The Next Time You See Me (22 page)

“I’m not normal,” Emily said. She looked up finally, taking in her mother’s damp, magnified eyes and sun-spotted neck. Her skin,
Emily noticed for the first time, was loose and slightly crinkled. Overripe.

“Baby, normal’s not who you are or how you’re born.” Her mother was smiling a little, calm again, as if Emily had made the only statement that she could have formulated a response to. “It’s how you act. It’s something you do on purpose.”

Chapter Fourteen

1.

The alarm sounded at four thirty
A.M
., and Dale, as he always did, snapped his bedside lamp on. Susanna stiffened, heart racing, and remembered her anger at him. Remembering was satisfying. The worst mornings were the ones when she softened, allowed him to kiss her, and then realized that they had fallen asleep arguing, nothing resolved, her acceptance of his kiss an absolution that she hadn’t intended to offer. On this morning she rolled away from the light and folded the end of the pillow over her eyes. She heard, muffled, the closet door rattle and slide on its track, the opening and closing of a dresser drawer. He left the light on when he went down the hall to the bathroom, and Susanna, muttering, rolled back over and fumbled, eyes pinched shut, to find the knob to turn it off.

She was wide-awake now, bladder tight, back cramped. She wouldn’t relieve herself until Dale finished his shower and went to the kitchen in his robe and slippers to pour a cup of coffee. There would be a minute or two, while he poured and stirred in half-and-half, when she could slip into the bathroom and out unseen, then crawl back under the covers as if she’d never awakened. Then Dale would return with his mug to the bathroom, wipe steam from the mirror, shave. He would dress in his best band director’s attire—the
dark gray wool suit, the white shirt, the black-and-gold silk tie that the students had presented him at the band banquet two years ago. He would move his coffee mug well out of the way before dousing himself with the strong cologne he favored on field days, the kind that smelled to Susanna like grass clippings and lemon. He would gel his short, dark hair so that the bangs lifted a little and a stiff part coursed left of center.

Their arguments had never been like this. They had, since Wednesday evening, been for the most part mutually silent—easy enough to maintain since Dale kept the band practicing late again both Thursday and Friday, coming in at night in time to kiss Abby while she slept, change into his pajamas, and fall immediately into a snoring deep sleep. They hadn’t shared a meal, a conversation. Abby had told Susanna with exaggerated, confused delight about the other evening with Daddy, how he’d let her come to the top of the band tower and watch the performance, how she said “Good job, team!” into his microphone and the big kids cheered, how he took her to McDonald’s for a Happy Meal on the way home. She kept playing with the prize from the Happy Meal, a wind-up character from a Saturday-morning cartoon that she wasn’t old enough to enjoy. “I didn’t like the rain,” she said a few times, as though her conscience were tugging at her for painting too rosy a picture. “I didn’t like the rain, but Daddy said that I wouldn’t melt.”

“And you didn’t,” Susanna told her.

“Little girls can’t melt,” Abby said.

Now he was standing in the doorway. Susanna, back in bed with her eyes still closed, felt him rather than saw him. His cologne tickled her sinuses.

“I’m leaving,” he said.

She groaned a little and propped herself up on her elbows, blinking in a sleepy way. She could tell by how he was looking at her that he knew she was putting on, and it embarrassed her. “Okay,” she said. “Be careful.” Then, an afterthought: “Good luck.”

He nodded. “We won’t be back tonight. We’re going to stay to
watch the finals no matter what. I went ahead and booked a block of rooms on Thursday.”

“Better not to be on the road late,” Susanna said. “It makes sense.”

He rubbed his mouth suddenly, a quick, brisk side-to-side, and Susanna noticed for the first time how tired he looked. “You could come with us. You don’t have to bring Abby. I called your mom last night, and she said she’d take her. I mean, it’s not a real trip away, I know, but we’d have some time alone, at least. I’m following the buses in the Blazer.”

“Dale—”

“Hear me out,” he said. He had a hand up, as if he were stopping traffic. “I know that you don’t love sitting in the bleachers all day. I know you’ve got work to do. But we could get lunch in Louisville tomorrow, go to that bookstore you like, go to a museum. We could go to that movie you were wanting to see—
The Piano
? Was that it? They’ll have it in Louisville.”

Susanna sat up in the bed. Her chest felt constricted with something, a guilty, tender ache. He was right about the movie she’d mentioned, had remembered her muttering over the preview when it had shown on TV, her remark that the Blockbuster in town would probably not ever even get it on video. He was wrong about the bleachers, because there had been a time, before Abby, when she
had
loved hanging out in the bleachers all day—when, almost as much a kid as her husband’s students, she had sat wrapped in a blanket, blowing into a paper cup of hot chocolate, and felt goose bumps at the sight of her husband on the sidelines in his sharp dark suit. She had known the shows then almost as well as Dale did, remembered the melodies, the formations, each toss of a flag, how the drum line did that little spin of their sticks between numbers, always to a round of game applause from the audience. Even now, she could imagine the pleasure of a late-autumn marching band competition, the awe of watching a 4A band take to the field in hundreds, the theater of
richer schools who had smoke machines and set pieces and elaborate costuming. She’d not grown immune to all of those charms—just too tired, now, to appreciate them.

“I’m meeting the detective about Ronnie again today,” she said. “I was going to get Mom or Denise to take Abby. We’re going back to the gas station to talk to the person who was working the night Ronnie would’ve come. She’s been out of town the last few days.”

“All right,” Dale said evenly.

“It would go a long way toward”—Susanna waved her hands between them—“this. Making this better. If you were to support me a little.” She picked at a thread on the quilt. “I appreciate your invitation. But I need your support more.”

He walked over to the bed and sat, and she moved out of the way, trying not to jerk, to seem as if she were avoiding his touch. His hip was next to her calf and he propped his arm on the other side of her legs, leaning forward a little, trying for intimacy, she knew, but instead making her suddenly claustrophobic, her feet pinned beneath the covers, her body forced to dip toward his.

“I don’t want you to be stuck with me,” he said. “I love you. I want you here. But I don’t want you stuck here.”

She looked at his earlobe and cleared her throat. “I’m not stuck,” she said quietly, and she couldn’t tell if it was a lie or not.

“It isn’t always easy for me, either,” he said. “There are nights when I think that we could have had more than this.”

“More than this house and these jobs and our child.”

“Yes,” he said again, forcefully, as if he expected an argument.

Susanna swallowed against a sharp pain. “I wonder what it would have been like,” she said.

“So do I.” He turned and looked at the alarm clock on his bedside table. “I’ve got to go. I’ll be late.” He rose and let his fingertips graze the bedspread over her thigh. She could see him wanting to say that he loved her again but worrying that she wouldn’t say it back to him.

“Be careful,” she said firmly and, she hoped, with finality.

“Yes,” he said. He adjusted his trousers and tucked his dress shirt back into place. “Thanks. I will.”

He brought Abby to her before leaving, an old, indulgent ritual they had lately abandoned. He tucked her, still sleeping, into Susanna’s open arms, so that Susanna could rest her chin on Abby’s head and Abby’s feet could rest on the tops of Susanna’s thighs. She reached down and held the little feet in her hands, delighting, as she always did, in their plump smoothness. They were the part of her daughter that still felt and looked more a baby’s than a child’s, the bones hidden in layers of flesh, the soles unblemished. Abby’s hands were already slimmer. Susanna had looked one day and realized that where the knuckles had once been dimples in the flesh—concavities—there was now the slightest angle of bone. The visible skeleton, memento mori.

Dale kissed their cheeks. “Bye, girls,” he said. The floor creaked, the outer door closed. Outside, the Blazer roared to life.

Abby shifted around and scrambled up Susanna, papery toenails catching purchase. She put her arms around Susanna’s neck, tangling her fingers in her long hair, and she drew her legs up so that her knees pressed into Susanna’s stomach. Abby was warm; she always felt hot to Susanna, even when her temperature—she so often checked—was normal. Pink-faced and sweaty, breath moist and sour with last night’s glass of milk. What was this creature they’d created? This living, growing thing, more animal at times like this than human? What if they had dared to have a life without her?

These thoughts inevitably led her to Tony Joyce, and just letting her mind slide along the syllables of his name sent—she could not help it—a thrill of excitement through her. Today she would see him again. Today, they would continue their search. Her heart, which Abby’s forehead was pressed against, thumped harder for a few beats as she imagined it: dropping Abby at her mother’s, meeting Tony at the station, accompanying him back to the Fill-Up. They would learn something, she just knew it. Maybe they would even track Ronnie down. At that last thought her stomach knotted with
vague dread, a sensation that Susanna made an effort not to settle upon. She thought instead about how it had felt to be near Tony, at the computer and in his police cruiser, and how she would get to repeat that pleasure today. And, for the first time, she thought about the fact that her husband would be gone overnight, hundreds of miles away.

Chapter Fifteen

1.

The stupidest thing Tony Joyce had ever said to another person also happened to be the truest thing: “You don’t understand the life of an athlete.”

It was a stupid thing to say because he had offered it, self-pityingly, as explanation for an action for which there was no real justification. He was twenty years old, nine months into his first real relationship with a woman, and that woman, Stefany, had discovered he had cheated. The time she knew about was not the only time, but it was the time he was trying to answer for, and it—the betrayal—had happened while he was on the road with the Bluefield Orioles, just as all of the other unacknowledged betrayals had.

“I don’t. Understand. The life. Of an athlete.” Stefany had repeated it back to him like that, slow and pissed off, eyes cut in a way that made Tony a trifle fearful that she would try to hit him. “Oh, poor you. Poor Tony with his great job and his girlfriend and his trips all over the country. Poor Tony with dinner fucking waiting for him every time his bus pulls into town from a game. Poor Tony, who gets to do exactly what he loves while the rest of us are just struggling for a paycheck.” She was standing, he remembered, across the kitchen peninsula from him, hands on her hips, head cocked sharply to the
side. “No, how on earth could I understand that? Of course you had to get some bitch on your jock the minute you got out of Bluefield.”

He had felt bad. He had. But the explanation, as inadequate and audacious as it sounded, was real. She didn’t understand the life of an athlete. She didn’t understand what it was to be him. And though Tony didn’t grasp it all himself—his was a life, up to this point, mostly unexamined—he knew intuitively that there was no life of the mind and heart for him that wasn’t intimately connected to his physical self. His joys, his sorrows, his sexuality, his cobbled-together spirituality: he experienced these sensations through his long, strong, talented limbs. Later, when Tony was no longer at the mercy, in all of those bad ways and glorious ways, of his physical self, he would realize that he had possessed, at his peak, a kind of genius. The occasional pains he’d known—a sprained wrist, bruising, one slash along his shin deep enough to require stitches—were specific and ephemeral and only made him appreciate more his body’s default status: its utter painlessness, its ease. At bat, he saw a ball coming and his body knew the stance to adopt, the way to hold the bat, the degree to which he needed to shift his weight to his left leg. He could, machinelike, compute from the moment of contact whether the hit was good or not, if his intention had been made manifest or if some uncalculated factor—a gust of wind, a movement in the grit under his cleat, an uncaught trickle of sweat loosening his grip on the bat—had subverted him.

So this, the unearthly physical genius, was part of it. But the life of an athlete, for a young man of his gifts, extended beyond the field. Sure, some of it was power, the power of living in a culture that valued his talents as much as he personally valued them—and this wasn’t true, certainly, of his artistic abilities. That power, though Stefany would deny it, was what had helped him land her. Oh, she could (and did) say that she loved him for him, that she would want him no matter what, but she, like most of the girlfriends among his teammates, had started as an Annie, a groupie—a Bluefield townie who knew that the minor leaguers always turned up by the end of
the night at Ramsey’s, where the owner fronted them free pitchers and pool after a game. She, like most of the girlfriends, had enough knowledge of the sport to spot the potential shining stars; Stefany had even, he later learned, started reading the industry rags, so that she could follow firsthand the statistics and rumors, the bold claims such as the one by a journalist who wrote in a minor-league seasonal roundup that “Tony Joyce may well prove to be the Orioles’ next Cal Ripken Jr.” The players went through the groupies like they did pitchers of beer and treated them poorly, swapping one woman for the next, breaking promises, throwing punches, taking cruel advantage—Tony had once seen Kyle Barberie, who ascended the next season to the majors, throw an unconscious woman over his shoulder and carry her to a bedroom—but they knew that they, too, were being used, being sized up as some woman’s ticket out of the backwater, and even a relationship like Tony and Stefany’s, long by anyone’s standards, couldn’t emerge from the shadow of its beginnings.