Someone Else's Love Story (9 page)

The phone rang again.

Chapter 4

T
he thing with feathers,” Bridget says. She changed Shit Park into a beautiful place full of birdhouses. People followed her lead, wanting a piece of that completeness that had let her do it. By summer the park had butterfly flowers and bird feeders and wind chimes strung in all the trees. Bridget had willed it into a reclaimed space.

William’s heart catches, stops, and then bangs his paused blood forward again. The restart is so rapid that William feels it as a revving in his chest. He stares at the girl in the poppy-covered dress. She has opened her mouth and pulled his wife’s voice out of his head and into the room.

Of course, it isn’t Bridget speaking. It only sounds like her. Exactly.

“I’m William Ashe,” he tells her. He wants her to say more words.

She says her name, “Shandi,” banging down on the first syllable and almost swallowing the
i
, just as Bridget would.

William has his own idea of destiny, separate from fate, or signs and wonders. So for a moment he has no explanation for the way she’s lighting up the room with Bridget’s presence. Bridget’s high, clear voice is so very different from this girl’s scared, husky whisper. It isn’t the words themselves, either, though the first thing she said was one of Bridget’s go-to quotes.

Then it clicks for him; it is the accent.

It’s not a common way of speaking. William, born and raised in Morningside, is a true Atlanta native. He talks like everyone on television.

Bridget spent her first sixteen years in a small town across the Georgia border, in North Carolina. Years of Atlanta living shortened her stretched vowels and clipped her blurry consonants, but her voice retained a mountain flavor, a muddling in her
a e i o
u
’s.

“Atlanta straight up, with a twist of hick,” Bridget called her accent.

Now this girl has said, “The thang with feathers,” just as Bridget would: flat, very Atlanta, but
i
gets away from her.

Stevie is asking about the origami bird, but William can’t look away from the girl, trembling in her poppy dress. Her dark eyes are nothing like Bridget’s wide-set, celery green gaze, but he looks anyway.

As Stevie speaks, Shandi says more words. “Gun,” she says. “File cabinet.”

William’s head dips in an involuntary nod at the way the
i
becomes an
ah
in her mouth.
Fahle cabinet
. Perfect.

“I can make a jumping frog. I can make a top,” William says, to pacify the cranky infant with the pistol. So he will shut up and let this girl talk more. If the bullet is his destiny, what can it hurt him to think of his wife’s voice, a little, now?

The girl doesn’t speak, though. She only leans in a little closer, as if she might stretch her neck over the head of the frightened child sheltered between them and kiss him. Her breath is warm. She smells clean, like Ivory soap and mint. He stills. He leans in, too, readying to put his lips on the mouth that makes sounds like Bridget’s mouth. But that isn’t what he wants.

He wants something else. Fiercely, a pulse so centered in his body it could be his own heart beating. It is the first time he has wanted anything in months, and it is ridiculous.

He wants to hear Bridget talking.

Not this girl. And not the Bridget he is angry with. He doesn’t want to hear the wife who could slough off her own body, the body he loved, and fly unthinking into a white light that her oxygen-deprived brain cells told her she was seeing. She went fast, joyfully soaring with their daughter toward her God, handing Twyla, safe and giggling, into the arms of the nicest possible Jesus. A PBS Jesus, unwounded and clean. That Bridget nodded and smiled, accepted it, saying, “Yes. Let the little children go to Him.” Even William’s little child, who might well have grown up to be a rationalist.

He doesn’t even want to hear his barely remembered wife, the one that Angel Bridget, hauling their baby cheerfully up to heaven, has superseded in his fury. His wife drinks small-batch bourbon straight up, has a flash-fire Irish temper, swarms under and around and over him in bed. Loves poetry and Stephen King novels equally. Plants a patchwork garden every spring, pansies in the carrots, crazy oregano trying to twine with shepherd’s needles. He knows these things, but they are like facts he read in a
National Geographic
in a waiting room one day, explicating the genus
Bridget
. She’s so distant she might as well be theoretical.

The Bridget he wants is an earlier version. Ponytail Bridget in pink Converse high-tops. Before there was a marriage or a Twyla or a Saturn wagon with no backseat.

He closes his eyes, simply to not be looking at this girl who isn’t Bridget, wanting to hear Bridget’s young voice in a singleminded, desperate, impossible way. An echo of his old obsession, from when he was seventeen, and she was the new girl at school. When he followed her from class to lunch to class to bus.

She read books—novels, nothing interesting—as she walked the halls, oblivious to him. She found a place at the brainiac girls’ lunch table; these were not the kinds of girls that football players noticed, so his stalking went uncharted. He was so invisible to Bridget that twice she passed by close enough for him to smell her lemony shampoo, and yet she never returned his gaze.

No one had yet proved the existence of human pheromones, but William became certain of them. There was no other explanation for his reaction to her solitary joy as she destroyed the park to raise it, to the way the basic shape and smell and sound of her undid him; she was indefinably correct for him. He knew it on the cellular level.

Weeks of this, sick with crazy, silent longing, and then Paula said it was starting to be “Unabomber creepy.” She made him skip class and took him up on the roof. She’d had a key, lifted off a janitor, since her freshman year, and often snuck up there to smoke.

William lay flat on his back, squinting up at the sun, still warm though the air had a decided chill. Paula stripped down to bra and panties, shivering, to bask in it. She might as well have been wearing one of her mother’s voluminous caftans. His own body was attuned only to where Bridget sat, two floors below. She was a red laser dot on his mental map of the school. The sun was nothing. The real heat licked up at him from Bridget. His whole body warmed and flushed, burning at the idea of her under him, even with a building in between them.

Meanwhile, on the roof, where his brain was, Paula said, “You have to make a move before you end up torturing puppies in a basement full of Bridget-themed blow-up dolls.”

“I don’t have a move,” William said. “Tell me a move.”

But instead Paula spent ten minutes cataloging all the ways in which William was not allowed to wreck it. “. . . 
and
you’re forbidden to talk about how to make really stable explosives. Or poisons. That will scare the shit out of her. Don’t talk about any of the six boring-ass books you are reading, or the fact that you’re reading six books concurrently, and God, don’t use the word
concurrently
, at all. Ever. I can’t believe I used it. I can’t believe I even know it. I probably caught it from you, and it’s the least sexy word on the planet.”

William listened with his brain, while his body, an entirely separate animal, tried to melt shingles and brick and wood and plaster so it could plummet into Bridget.

“So far, you’ve told me nineteen things not to do.”

“Really? You counted?” Paula said, sitting up. She was making an expression at him.

When William was little, he had a book called
How Are You Peeling?
It was full of pictures of vegetables with faces. The radish is happy. The eggplant is sad. His therapist wanted him to learn to recognize the same looks on the faces of his classmates or his parents. He’d outgrown the book, but he was still supposed to do the exercise. Right now, he should ask himself,
What is she feeling, if Paula
raises one eyebrow up and not the other?
But Paula generally said exactly what she meant with him. It was one of his favorite things about her. He was free to take the question at face value.

“Yes. Exactly nineteen. Do you want me to say them back to you?”

“God, no.” In his peripheral vision, he saw Paula lean forward so that all her shaggy black hair dropped around her face. She said, “I have made myself a hair tent for thinking in.”

They could hear the bell ring even through the roof. Bridget would be rising from her desk, moving toward her locker. He tracked her on his mental map, wishing he was on her level. He would like to look and look at Bridget’s face, try to guess what she meant when she lifted just one eyebrow.

“Tell me three things to actually do,” William said to the hair tent.

“You could go the secret admirer route?” Paula used both hands to part her hair and her up-tilted eyes peered out. “Perfume and anonymous love notes. Girls eat that shit up.”

Not a bad start, but too circular. “That ends with us back here, because I have to eventually talk to her.”

“Yeah, there’s always a downside,” Paula said, then put her finger up in the air, making a hook.

William grinned. Last year, after they’d had sex, he’d felt comfortable enough to ask if he could practice his assigned peer conversations with her. He’d been bad at picking up on jokes, sarcasm especially, which relied so wholly on inflection. He was much better at it now. At one point, early on, she’d suggested making the finger hook every time she was kidding. He had said it was a good idea, and she had rolled her eyes and made the finger hook, because she had been kidding.

“I got it!” Paula said. “Make
her
talk. I’ll write you a list of questions. Then you listen and say all nineteen parts of her answers back to her. That way she knows you listened, and plus it makes her think that you guys have stuff in common. I read it in
Cosmo
.”

“She’ll ask me questions back,” William said.

“So, answer them. Maybe she’ll like you.” William made the finger hook, and Paula grabbed it and shoved it down. “I’m serious. She could like you. I like you, Bubba.”

“Yeah, but you don’t want to be my girlfriend,” William said.

“Please. I’m a senior.” Paula flopped down onto her back, her shoulder pressed companionably against his. He barely felt her, his whole physical self yearning itself ragingly down. William sat inside his overheated skin, trying to think and failing with a torrent of hormones clotting up what was generally an excellent brain. He could feel his body starting to rock itself.

Paula curled toward him on her side and bit his shoulder. Hard, but friendly. It was Paula’s version of one of his therapist’s old tricks, like origami or football; give the body-animal something to do so his mind could go about its business.

When he looked at her, fully present on the roof at last, she let go with her teeth and said, “Sex ambush. You need to drop her down, but hard. Get her hooked on the bod and the crazy-hot moves before she clocks how ever-fuckin’ weird you are.”

This might well work on Paula. She could be caught up and swept along, laughing, into any plan that pleased her in the moment. But it depended on Bridget being like Paula in this way. The Bridget he’d observed was wholly self-contained and thinky. She made plans, and people fell into them with her. She did not lie on rooftops in her underwear biting male friends. She changed parks with subversive tulips. She sat at the smart girls’ lunch table, observing more than participating, reserved. She seemed . . . not untouchable, not at all. But not something he could lay his hands on without express permission.

“That plan will end with me in prison,” he said, but everything Paula had told him to do and not do was folding itself into a shape in his good brain.

“Well, a kiss ambush then.” Paula was still talking. “It’s not like you can win the girl by doing chemistry.”

“Yes, I can,” William said, a variation on her plan growing clearer and more detailed by the second. “You just said I could.”

“Uh, no?” Paula said. “I didn’t say that.”

“Yeah, you did,” William told her. She simply hadn’t realized it, because like most people, Paula didn’t understand that the entire world was mostly chemistry, doing itself.

He hears ringing again, so Bridget is in English class. But it is not the bell. It is a phone. William blinks and feels the room reload around him. Oh, right. He is having a robbery. He is having a robbery while all the carefully compartmentalized sections of his life jumble and collide and refuse to be contained.

“Fuck!” screams Stevie, so shrill he sounds like a child. William’s paper-bird spell has been broken.

The girl in the poppy-covered dress stares up at him. She is making the face that William recognizes as the far end of anxious, and her little boy’s body is trembling, pressed against William’s side. Yet here is William, wanting to re-court his teenage pre-wife, still so angry with her that the only Bridget he can stand to desire is two stories and sixteen years distant from him.