Someone Else's Love Story (32 page)

“William!” I said.

He jerked and then his eyes met mine, and I knew he hadn’t heard me ask about the cab.

He smiled, and it was like he caught all the morning sunlight and pulled it into himself. He was golden and so lovely.

He leaned toward me, and I thought,
Really? Here? Right now?

But I was ready for it. More than. The last time I’d come this close to kissing him we’d been held at gunpoint, so this was hardly less appropriate. I felt my spine lengthening and my body swayed his way, my eyelids drifting closed.

But his eyes were open, all the way, and his gaze passed right through me to some imagined landscape.

He said, his face too close to mine, “I know how to fix Natty.”

“What?” I said, my half-mast lids flying back open at my son’s name. William stood up, his movements abrupt and excitement in every line of his body.

He said, “Stevie is just a person.”

“Stevie?” I said, confused, and then I realized who he meant. “Stevie who
shot
you?”

“Technically speaking, Mrs. Grant’s foot shot me. But yes. That Stevie. Steven Parch.” William smiled that same beautiful, light-filled smile, but it wasn’t for me. He smiled it for his idea, and then he said the craziest damn thing I’d ever heard.

“We have to take Natty to the hospital. You need to let him really look at Stevie. Stevie has no fangs, no giant guns for hands. He needs to see Stevie being just a person. A quiet, sleeping person.”

I heard what he was saying and it was crazy. So crazy, yes, but also? I thought maybe it could work.

Chapter 12

N
atty is perched on the slate gray granite kitchen island at the condo, banging one foot into a cabinet door. He is fixing himself a mixed juice in a sippy cup. William is supervising. He keeps one hand steady on the backs of the containers as Natty pours, first orange juice, then pineapple.

“Will he see me?” Natty asks.

“No. He can’t see you,” William says. Steven Parch can’t see anyone. But Natty’s foot keeps banging the cabinet, and his serious, straight eyebrows are folded into a crinkle. “Even if you stood right by him, he couldn’t see you. But you’ll be on a different floor, with your mom. Can I put the carton away?”

As Natty nods, the doorbell rings. Shandi’s heels clack and bang against the oak floor as she goes to answer it. With the clutter gone, he can see the whole place is composed of sharp corners. Sounds bounce off the merciless surfaces, amplified to harshness.

William says, “You’ve already been, remember? It’s the same hospital where you came to visit me. You won’t be any closer to him than when you came to my room.”

Natty doesn’t answer. He picks up the full cup, sucking his lower lip into his mouth as he struggles to get the cap screwed on. William lets him, leaning back as droplets of juice spatter onto Natty’s shorts. William admires the independence that comes with being three, or perhaps it comes with being Natty. He knows too small a sample to state definitively what three is like.

Natty at three wants to help. He wants to help with everything.
I can do it myself
is his favorite sentence, whether he can reasonably do it himself or not. The kid would try to drive if Shandi would give him the keys to the VW. Maybe she should. The car is sized about right for him.

Shandi has let someone in. In the living room, William can hear a man’s voice, talking.

“It is not always possible to fall in love in blackberry season,” the man says.

William can hear each of these odd words clearly. The acoustics in this high-ceilinged, sharp-cornered place are excellent, and the man is speaking slowly. His tones are formal, as if he is giving a speech. “You might enter the many dark chambers without this—”

“Walcott!” Natty says, his whole face lighting.

“—clustering. You might start by washing your lover’s mouth in snow, or tease apart the spring tendril root of him.”

Natty tries to hurl himself down off the island and shatter his bones on the cold tile floor.

William catches him and swings him up, saying, “Wait.”

Walcott says, “Or scrape the old leaves out of his autumn hair, on your way to making his acquaintance in loam.”

The words are intense and personal. William isn’t meant to hear them.

“Put me down,” Natty demands. “It’s Walcott come!”

Natty wriggles and flails downward, helped by gravity. William, unprepared, must lower him or drop him. The second his sneakers touch the floor, Natty runs for the living room. William follows, feeling strongly that their entry at this point is not ideal.

Shandi has her back to them, but her arms are full of flowers. A huge, chaotic mass of wildflowers, purple and gold, spilling out of a paper cone. Walcott, the boy who was so angry at the hospital, stands in front of her in his flip-flops, reading from a piece of creased printer paper.

“But if it is chosen in the kingdom of blackberries, that you shall be one of the ones—”

As Walcott sees Natty, he smiles around the words. Then, as he sees William, his smile and voice cut out abruptly. At the face change, Shandi turns. Her eyes are wide and bright. When she sees William, she flushes and her lips part.

“Oh, hi,” Shandi says to William. “We were just . . .” She trails off and sets the flowers aside very quickly. They lie in a careless spill across the coffee table.

Walcott closes the paper at the fold, shutting it.

“I didn’t realize you had company,” Walcott says, and then he swings Natty up in his arms. “Hey, Natty Bumppo.”

“Walcott! I mixed my own juice, perfect,” Natty says.

“Cool,” Walcott says, and then, to William, “Can you give us a sec, buddy?”

William doesn’t like this, not at all. It is his own name for Paula’s man scraps who tag along to brunch.

“William,” he says, and doesn’t move.

“I know who you are,” the kid says, as if William has offered an introduction instead of a correction.

Then they stand there, eyeballing each other. It isn’t comfortable.

William finds his weight shifting forward, to the balls of his feet. Walcott is leaning toward him, too, shoulders braced. Between them is Shandi, and is he prepping to butt antlers with this boy?

William and Shandi have had a single, ambivalent almost-date that ended in a series of sickening revelations. William has barely begun to entertain the idea of replacement, of choosing a different life. So why this animal posturing? It’s ludicrous, but his body is undeniably doing it.

Is it Natty? He cares for Natty, but in a mild, relaxing way: no ownership, no true responsibility, no desperation. Discovering three through Natty has a faint, sick sweetness to it. He still can’t imagine Twyla at six. Twyla at nine. He has no frame of reference. But Natty is a window into three.

Three is oblivious to testosterone and subtext. Into the silence, Natty says, “Walcott, we’re going to visit Stevie. You should come.”

“Stevie? Stevie who?” Walcott asks. And then his eyes widen and he says to Shandi, “Stevie the robber?” in incredulous tones.

Shandi says, “He thinks Stevie comes into his room at night.”

“We can’t get the Stevie-hole taped properly,” Natty explains over her.

Walcott smiles at Natty’s precise diction. “Not properly, huh? Okay. I’ll fix it.”

As if Walcott has superior imaginary hole-taping skills. This is ridiculous enough, without William’s nostrils flaring, but they do.

“Natty’s therapist thinks it could help to see the real Stevie, from a safe distance.” Shandi steps to William and puts her hand lightly on his arm. “It was William’s idea.”

As her body changes places in the room, moving to him, the tension drops. For him, anyway. Not Walcott. Walcott takes a couple of steps in closer, trying to re-create the geometry of three adult bodies, equidistant. But William has already won whatever this is, and he doesn’t even know if he wants it.

Walcott says, “Shandi, can I talk to you a sec? Alone?”

“I’ll be upstairs,” William says, and manually removes himself from the remnants of the competition. He crosses the room and starts up the stairs, glad he is wearing his soft-soled running shoes so he does not bang and clatter. As soon as he turns the first corner, Shandi starts talking.

“I’m so glad you came! I tried to give you space, but Walcott, space sucks.”

The acoustics have not yet afforded them any privacy. William might as well still be in the room.

“Yeah, that whole noble retreat from the field—I’m not that guy. I can’t toss my hat and heart and pants all in the ring and then sag off like some kind of moopy loser at your first frown.” William climbs faster, and as he rounds the second corner, the voices are fainter. “Not to mention, you’re my best friend, having a crap month. What kind of a tool would disappear right now?”

Natty says, “Don’t disappear, Walcott.”

“Never. I’m sorry I—”

William rounds the second corner, and now he can’t make out the words. Good. Let the kid take his shot. At the same time, if he really wanted to facilitate Walcott’s courtship, he could have taken Natty with him.

He goes all the way up to the third-floor landing, a clear space with a computer desk and the bedrooms on either side. When he came up to tape the closet hole, Shandi’s door was closed. It’s open now.

She has a double bed with a sharp metal frame and the kind of generic bedding that is common in hotels. It’s unmade, the white sheets in a stir. He only knows it’s Shandi’s room because the chair is draped with a bright yellow sundress and there are red flowered sandals on the floor.

Now he can’t hear Shandi’s or Natty’s voices at all. Every now and again he hears the wordless rumble of Walcott, saying impassioned things and failing to regulate his volume.

William shakes his head, glad to be a full two floors above it. The boy in the flip-flops is on the losing side of an either/or equation. William has been on the losing side of an even more weighted equation, much like this, before, when he was driving week after week to the convent where Bridget had tucked herself away. He paced around her walls for nine months, relentless, without so much as a glimpse of her hair.

Walcott, with his poetry and flowers, is making a tactical error. He should absent himself. William stopped prowling there three months before Bridget was to take her vows, though this wasn’t a tactic. He stopped because he’d lost. He’d learned that in the either/or of God or William, God won. Every time.

The weeks after he came to terms with that fact were not good weeks.

He didn’t understand the mechanics, then. It didn’t occur to him that when he stopped coming after her, he removed himself from the equation. She no longer had the power to choose, and that was when she came to him.

She appeared on his doorstep in the middle of a cold, gray Saturday in March. A spring thunderstorm lingered overhead all morning, alternately drizzling and dumping water down in cold sheets. There had been no sunshine for hours. She banged at his front door with her fist, loud enough for him to hear it over the murmur of rain against his roof. He opened his door to find her standing on the small, square porch, wringing her hands.

The wind blew rain in sideways to spatter against her. Her hair was red, slick strings, clinging to her face and neck. Her shoulders were braced.

He said her name, like a question, his whole body vibrating.

She shrugged, helpless, and said, “I can’t hear God.”

This seemed healthy, actually, but here was Bridget, in extremis. He opened the door wider and said, “Come in. It’s pouring.”

“I don’t think I should?” she said. Definitely a question, and he began to understand why she had come. “Do you know who I’ve been talking to all month? Not God. I’ve been talking to you. It’s an awful blasphemy. At night, I lie down alone and talk to you. When we pray the hours, I’m writing you long letters in my head, and God is gone from me. He’s gone. What am I supposed to do about that?”

“I don’t know. I’m not religious,” William said, very dry, and Bridget snorted, a flash of her own real laughter, at his understatement. Then she shook her head.

“William, I’ve heard the call since I was six years old, and now, when I’m this close to answering, He stops? I should hear Him ringing through the storm like bells.” She took the heels of her hands and dashed tears or rain away, and then she pressed her lips into a line and met his eyes. “Maybe this is good? Maybe this is right? Maybe it’s a message, calling me here, instead? If you still want me.”

Of course he wanted her. He’d always wanted her. How silly, how sweet, for her to put it as an if.

His body saw Bridget, red-cheeked, soaking wet, twisting her hands. Her breath came in pants, and her pupils had expanded to wide black rings. These things were, at last, permission. She was issuing a readable, animal call, and his body rose in answer.

He wanted to bring her inside, close the door. He knew better than to take her to the bedroom. The long walk down that hall contained so much intent. No, better to lay her down on the thick rug in front of the fireplace. This knowledge made him feel a grateful wash of love for Paula and the women who came after her. Because of them, he knew exactly how to peel wet clothes away. There would be no fumbling at catches and straps. He knew a thousand different things to try on her pale novitiate’s body. He could do the things, all of them he knew, until she forgot to be shy, until her head lolled back and her body became stretchy and pliable and she opened to him.