Someone Else's Love Story (33 page)

She wanted him to. It was why she came.

But William was not the boy he was when Bridget last declared her love for him, in Paula’s filthy old apartment. He’d grown into his body, with all its red washes of inexplicable feeling. It no longer owned him. He owned it.

Bridget was not coming to him whole, intact inside that completeness he first saw when she destroyed Shit Park’s flower bed in order to rebuild it. A nun was God’s bride. She was only having wedding-day jitters.
Perhaps not God
, she said.
Perhaps you, instead
. But if he let her form the question as an either/or, he lost.

And yet, how could he help it, when she was so beautiful? He stepped out, barefoot, into the bite of rain blowing across his porch, and then his arms were around her, at last. His arms dragged her to him. It was not a thing he could have stopped. Not with Bridget asking to be his, right now. He understood that it was only for a moment.

He lifted her, pulling her up against the length of him, her own shoes falling off her feet as he put his mouth on hers. She relaxed herself into him, winding her arms around his neck so tight.

He could not put walls between them and the world. If he brought her in the house, there could not be tea and talking. He would assist her in her panicked sin. It would happen. He would become a learning experience, the mistake that clarified her place. He’d become her fond memory, or perhaps just her regret.

If he wanted to retain her, their sex could only happen as a sacrament.

He left the door open, left it behind them and carried her down the steps. He walked her out into the rain, into the cold spring storm. It beat at the outside of their bodies, the ice of it the only thing that kept him from lying down with her and having her in the grass. It soaked them, closed their eyes, bound them tighter. It could not touch the heat between them.

He kissed her mouth, her throat, her wet closed eyelids.

“You can’t be a nun,” he said, his voice so hoarse it didn’t sound like his. “You love me. But you can be my wife and still belong to God. Still be Catholic. These are not mutually exclusive states of being.” Those were the words he said, over and over. “These are not mutually exclusive states of being.” He said them into her skin, the cold rain getting in his mouth. He said them as if they were romantic, after all.

Bridget clung to him, and he said the words into her hair, against her cheeks, against her jaw. She tilted her face back and let the rain fall down onto it. He said them with his mouth against the pulse point in her throat, the orange-blossom-and-green-herb smell of his own catalyst mixing with the essential smell of Bridget.

She put her hands on his face and made him meet her eyes. Her face was full of an expression that he didn’t know.

She said, “I’ve missed you both so much. Yet here you both are, in this yard. You’re both out here in the rain and the dirt of the world.”

She said these things and she was laughing. She was his. He had not won the either/or. He never won it, but she was his then anyway.

That was his final act of courtship. He walked her back to her parents’ place in the rain and went inside with her to disappoint them. He converted. He married her. They came together on their wedding night as if they were immortal.

“William?” Shandi is calling.

His body shudders and turns at the welcome interruption. He can’t stand here looking at one woman’s bed and longing for another. The dissonance is a physical discomfort.

The drama in the den has played itself out, but here is William, remembering rain on his face and nonsensically rooting for Walcott. They are so young. Walcott doesn’t understand what he is risking.

“William, we need to go,” Shandi calls, and he doesn’t have to do this right now. Not today. Today, all he has to do is go and look at the man he hasn’t quite killed.

T
he Stevie who haunts Natty’s room is huge and toothy, with guns for hands. The original was a dumpy little fellow. Real Stevie had mucus on his lip and a crappy, ancient gun. He wielded its authority with no grace. This is what William wants Natty to see.

Natty’s psychologist convinced Shandi that direct interaction might be too stressful. She modified William’s plan. While William set up his MacBook in the hospital cafeteria, Shandi walked Natty through a quiet wing of the hospital. She showed him beds full of people resting, explaining that hurt people have to lie down, and that doctors and nurses are there checking on them, every minute. The psychologist told her how to explain a coma to a three-year-old, and she did that, too. That part went well; now they are in stage two.

Shandi and Natty sit by the MacBook, running FaceTime. William and his iPad are on their way upstairs to Stevie’s room. With the iPad’s camera, William can show Natty reassuring things from a safe distance: the cop outside the door, the peaceful room, Stevie lying motionless and quiet. William can send select still images or a live-feed video, depending on how upsetting Stevie’s tubes are.

William passes the nurses’ station. It’s technically illegal for William, the victim in a crime, to visit Stevie, but Stevie was transferred out of ICU after they took him off the ventilator. They needed the bed, so he has become the floor nurse’s problem until he can be moved to a long-term care facility. William waves at the young nurse manning it, and she waves back, smiling. The only true barrier is the cop outside the door, and Detective Bialys has cleared it with him.

William turns right, following the room numbers as they rise toward Stevie’s. He’s only a few rooms away when he passes a short, stump-ended branch of hallway that only goes left. It’s little more than a nook containing a few chairs, a magazine rack, and a Coke machine.

There is a girl sitting in one of the chairs. She’s so familiar that he pauses. He cannot place her, but he knows this profile, knows this chopped, flat fall of burgundy-brown hair. He takes two steps toward her. She senses it and turns her face to him. She gasps and leaps to her feet. She knows him too, this very curvy girl wedged into a tight skirt, her large breasts tumbling out of a low-cut V-neck T-shirt.

A black and yellow bird is tattooed on one breast. He knows this bird, this thing with feathers, and he recognizes her even before her mouth opens into a surprised O, showing him the front teeth, broken off to stumps.

It’s the weeping clerk from the Circle K, out of context in this waiting area off the hallway to Stevie’s room.

She tries to dash past him, angling left, but William matches her movement and blocks her in.

“Are we going to have a chase?” he asks, incredulous.

She gulps and her eyes roll around as she backs toward the Coke machine. He follows her into the alcove, and at his advance, she panics. She runs at him again, faking left before trying to dart right, telegraphing every move. William back-steps and matches her, blocking her path but avoiding actual contact.

William has put it together by then. She belongs to Stevie.

She is the reason Stevie knew when the Grants would be emptying their cash safe and making their weekly bank run. He can’t help but admire how cool she was—how cool she and Stevie both were—working to seem unconnected. Stevie made her lie down on the floor with the rest of them. Even after the robbery went sour, he kept her up against the hostage wall, protecting her. The whole time she was his mate, her real fear making it easier to crouch and hide among them.

She pauses, and her eyes twitch back and forth in their sockets, seeking a way around him. He flexes his hands, spreading his arms out wide so she can take in the size of him.

He says, “It’s no good. I’ll catch you.”

The stumps of her teeth bite down on her lower lip, and William has to stop himself from flinching. His tongue runs over the surface of his own teeth, checking them, and the motion causes a wave of déjà vu.

The clerk backs up to the closest chair. She plops down into it and slumps there in a heap.

Another piece clicks into place, and William says, “Did you set my car on fire?”

She hunches down, curling even farther around her own middle.

“No?” she says. It lilts up, asking if he will accept the lie.

But the timing fits. Earlier that day, the uncle agreed to remove Stevie from the ventilator.

“You set my car on fire,” he says, not a question now. “Get up.”

The cop outside Stevie’s door can cuff her to something and call Bialys to come get her. She rises to her feet, still hunched, her elbows bent so that her hands cup at her belly. He looks at her hands, pressing into herself. The clerk, in the Circle K, was built like a taller, fuller version of Shandi. Shandi is a figure eight, her center impossibly narrow, but this girl’s middle has thickened. Her hands press into her abdomen, shielding it.

She’s pregnant. Not hugely so. Not yet. But enough for him to see it, now that he is looking.

I’m a daddy, too,
Steven Parch said. William heard it as a boast, but perhaps it was a message to the mother of his child, sitting with her back against the hostage wall.

Steven Parch’s child exists.

His earpiece chirps. He checks the phone. Shandi, wondering why he hasn’t made the FaceTime connection yet.

He taps his Bluetooth and says, “I ran into some red tape. Give me a minute? I still have to check in with the cop.”

“Okay,” she says.

He clicks off, as phone efficient as Bialys, though her breath was on the intake, prepping for more words. He hopes that they were only pleasantries. All his focus is here.

Tears are spilling down the clerk’s cheeks, making black mascara tracks. Now she looks more like the girl that he remembers.

“What’s your name?” he asks her. He has forgotten it.

“Carrie,” she says. “Carrie Miller. What are you going to do?”

What should he do with a pregnant girl, one stupid enough to come creeping around the edges of her own botched crime? She has probably been here most days, trying to overhear news of Stevie’s condition. Blowing people’s cars up, albeit poorly, when she’s gotten that news.

“I don’t know,” he says.

“If you make me leave, I think he’ll die. I’ve been sitting here praying him to be alive. Don’t make me go.” Her voice is thick with snot, and William’s neck and back are stiff with tension.

Why is this day so full of awful, hopeless love? That young man spouting poetry, and now this damp, burbling girl. William is no better, racking himself into remembering the day he won his wife while staring at another woman’s bed. All this overblown, untenable human feeling, and to what end, when nobody gets out alive?

Carrie crouches protectively over her pregnancy. She’s been hiding out in the hospital, though her presence is tantamount to a confession. A glimpse of her, and William put the whole thing together in a matter of seconds. Bialys wouldn’t have needed half that time.

She should be arrested for her shitty car bomb, and her part in the robbery, too. She stands weeping and trembling with her hands wrapped around her gestating midline. What a worthless set of parents this poor spatter of hopefully multiplying cells has drawn.

“Oh, fucking fuck,” William says. He can have her arrested later. “Come on. I’ll get you in to see him.”

Now she stares at him with such wild hope that he can’t stand to look at her. He turns and grasps her elbow, and together they go out of the alcove and down to Stevie’s room.

The cop outside is an old guy, reading some kind of novel. He stands as they approach.

“I’m William,” he says, and they shake hands. He doesn’t explain Carrie, and the cop doesn’t ask.

“You can go on in,” the cop says. He opens the door for them like a butler, and he closes it behind them.

Carrie gasps when she sees Stevie. He is curled on his side, facing out into the room. His eyes are closed, and that’s good, for Natty. The more it looks like he is sleeping, the better. His hair is growing in, brown fuzz over the place where William hit him.

Carrie starts toward him, but William still has her elbow. He clamps down on her.

“Sit,” he says, and points to a chair by the window.

“I need to—”

“No. There are more people downstairs, and this delay could make them come up here. You sit. I need to send them video, now. You stay out of the shots and don’t make sounds. You can get close to him later.” He doesn’t say
while I decide what to do with you
.

Carrie subsides into the chair, but she never looks away from Stevie. She swallows and wrings her hands, leaning toward him in the chair. William can’t connect her rapt expression to the reality of the scrawny boy who is curled on his side. The Stevie she sees is probably no more realistic than Natty’s huge fanged version.

William connects to the laptop with FaceTime. He is careful to hold his iPad at an angle that shows only his face and the wall behind him. Not Stevie yet, and certainly not Carrie. On the screen, he can see Shandi, with Natty on her lap. Natty has one finger in his mouth, sucking it. Shandi, peeking from behind him, looks tense.

William makes a relaxed smile and says, “Hello, Natty.”