Authors: Jill McCorkle
“They have their mom.”
“I know, and I am so fucking jealous of that!” He took the control from her hand and hit pause just as Bob entered his office and closed the door. “How sick am I?” He put his hand to his chest, teeth clenched. “I keep thinking,
You lucky little shits to get to come home from the funeral and have a mother
.” He took a deep breath and then hit play, reached for her hand again and squeezed. They could see his kids and wife in the doorway, hear them talking. His wife told them she was making their dad’s favorite dinner, and it occurred to Sarah that she had no idea what that might be. “Then he’ll read to you,” she said. There was the
sound of a mixer, refrigerator opening and closing. The girl was singing a song Sarah recognized from
Sesame Street
, and on the screen Bob and Emily are interrupted by their neighbor, Howard, as they always are. Billy pointed to Bob’s wide tie and laughed. In the kitchen, his daughter kicked her pink boot against the counter and demanded a snack. The boy dangled a bag of chips in the air, threw back his head and laughed.
Billy smiled, watching them, and then turned back to the television. “I don’t want to go,” he whispered.
“Then don’t.”
This was the conversation they might have had after everything blew up; it was what Sarah had always wished had been said. Billy was looking sleepy and said he just needed to rest his eyes for a minute.
“Promise you won’t let Bob get drunk and screw up this time,” he mumbled, the grip of his hand loosening as he dozed in and out.
“Okay.” She heard someone at the door, his wife’s brother. Bob was struggling to order the moo goo gai pan and having a terrible time speaking. Billy smiled during the slurred speech.
When it was time to leave, she pulled her hand from his and stood, debating whether or not to wake him to say good-bye. With the wife’s encouragement, she leaned forward and hugged him.
“I wasn’t really such a disaster, was I?” he asked.
“No, not really.” She kissed his cheek quickly and then she
was up and moving, in the car and moving forward, calling her husband to wish him a safe trip, calling home to leave a message for her sons, asking that they please feed the dog. She turned onto the highway, shifting gears and going faster and faster, under the overpass, and then full speed ahead, the pines a green blur off to the side, the odometer turning and turning as she flew right past the moon.
MAGIC WORDS
Because Paula Blake
is planning something secret, she feels she must account for her every move and action, overcompensating in her daily chores and whatever demands her husband and children make.
Of course I’ll pick up the dry cleaning, drive the kids, swing by the drugstore
. This is where the murderer always screws up in a movie, way too accommodating, too much information. The guilty one always has trouble maintaining direct eye contact.
“Of course I will take you and your friend to the movies,” she tells Erin in the late afternoon. “But do you think her mom can drive you home? I’m taking your brother to a sleepover, too.” She is doing it again, talking too much.
“Where are
you
going?” Erin asks, mouth sullen and sarcastic as it has been since her thirteenth birthday two years ago.
“Out with a friend,” Paula says, forcing herself to try and make eye contact. The rest of the story she has practiced for days, ready to roll.
She’s someone I work with, someone going through a really hard time, someone brand new to the area, knows no one, really needs a friend
.
But her daughter never looks up from the glossy magazine spread before her, engrossed in yet another drama about a teen star lost to drugs and wild nights. Paula’s husband doesn’t even ask her new friend’s name or where she moved from, yet the answer is poised and waiting on her tongue:
Tonya Matthews from Phoenix, Arizona
. But her husband is glued to his latest issue of
Our Domestic Wildlife
—his own newsletter to the neighborhood about various sightings of wild and possibly dangerous creatures: coyotes, raccoons, bats. Their voicemail is regularly filled with detailed sightings of funny-acting raccoons in daylight or reports of missing cats. Then there’s the occasional giggling kid faking a deep voice to report a kangaroo or rhino. She married a reserved and responsible banker who now fancies himself a kind of watchdog Crocodile Dundee. They are both seeking interests beyond the safe perimeters of a lackluster marriage. His are all about threat and encroachment, being on the defense, and hers are about human contact, a craving for warmth, like one of the bats her husband fears might find its way into their attic.
Her silky legs burn as if shamed where she has slathered lavender body lotion whipped as light as something you might eat. And the new silk panties, bought earlier in the day, feel heavy around her hips. But it is not enough to thwart the thought of what is ahead of her, the consummation of all those notes and looks exchanged with the sales rep on the second floor during weeks at work, that one time in the stairwell —hard thrust of a kiss interrupted by the heavy door and footsteps two floors up —where the fantasized opportunity became enough of a reality to lead to this date. They have been careful and the paper trail is slight —unsigned suggestive notes with penciled times and places —all neatly rolled like tiny scrolls and saved in the toe of the heavy wool ski socks she has never worn back in the far corner of her underwear drawer, where heavier, far more substantial pairs of underwear than she is wearing cover the surface. It all feels as safe as it can be because he has a family, too. He has just as much to lose as she does.
And now she looks around to see the table filled with cartons of Chinese food and cereal boxes from the morning. The television blares from the other room. Her son is anxious to get to his sleepover; her daughter has painted her toenails, and the fumes of the purple enamel fill the air. Her husband is studying a map that shows the progression of killer bees up the coast. He speaks of them like hated relatives who are determined to drop in whether you want them or not. Their eventual arrival is as
inevitable as all the other predicted disasters that will wreak havoc on human life.
“Where did you say you’ve got to go?” her husband asks. Her palms are sweating and she is glad she is wearing a turtleneck to hide the nervous splotches on her chest. She won’t be wearing it later. She will slip it off in the darkness of the car after she takes Gregory to the sleepover and Erin and her friend to the cinema. Under the turtleneck she is wearing a thin silk camisole, also purchased that very afternoon at a pricey boutique she had never been in before, a place the size of a closet where individual lingerie items hang separately on the wall like art. A young girl, sleek, pierced, and polished, gave a cool nod of approval when she leaned in to look at the camisole. She finally chose the black one after debating between it and the peacock blue. Maybe she will get the blue next time, already hoping that this new part of her life will remain. Instead of the turtleneck, she will wear a loose cashmere cardigan that slides from one shoulder when she leans her head inquisitively. It will come off easily, leaving only the camisole between them in those first awkward seconds. She tilts her head as she has practiced, and with that thought all others disappear, and now she doesn’t know what has even been asked of her. Her heart beats a little too fast. She once failed a polygraph test for this reason. She had never —would never —shoot heroin, but her pulse raced with the memory of someone she knew doing just that. Did she do drugs? The answer was no, but
her mind took her elsewhere, to her panic when she saw her ride home from a high school party with his head thrown back and teeth gritted, arm tied off with a large rubber band, while a friend loomed overhead to inject him, one bloody needle already on the littered floor.
You can’t afford to let your mind wander in a polygraph test or in life as now when once again she finds herself looking at her husband with no idea of what he has just said. Her ability to hold eye contact is waning, the light out the window, waning, but the desire that has built within all these weeks is determined to linger, flickering like a candle under weak labored breath. Somewhere, her husband says, between their house and the interstate, are several packs of coyotes, their little dens tucked away in brush and fallen trees. The coyote is a creature that often remains monogamous. The big bumbling mouthful of a word lingers there, a pause that lasts too long before he continues with his report. He heard the coyotes last night so this is a good time to get the newsletter out, a good time to remind people to bring their pets indoors. Dusk is when they come out, same as the bats, most likely rabid.
The kids are doing
what they call creepy crawling. Their leader picked the term up from the book
Helter Skelter
. They slip in and out behind trees and bushes, surveying houses, peeping in windows, finding doors ajar or unlocked. Their leader
is a badly wounded boy in need of wounding others, and so he frightens them, holds them enthralled with his stories of violence or murder. They might not believe all that he says but they believe enough to know he is capable of bad things. As frightening as it is to be with him, it is more frightening not to be, to be on the outside and thus a potential victim.
To the kids he looks tough with his piercings and tattoos, his mouth tight and drawn by a bitterness rarely seen on such a young face, some vicious word always coiled on his tongue and ready to strike those who least expect it, though he has to be careful when bagging groceries at Food Lion; he has been reprimanded twice for making sarcastic remarks to elderly shoppers, things like,
You sure you need these cookies, fat granny?
He has been told he will be fired the next time he is disrespectful, which is fine with him. He doesn’t give a shit what any of them say. Dirt cakes the soles of his feet like calloused hooves as he stands on the asphalt in front of the bowling alley, smoking, guzzling, or ingesting whatever gifts his flock of disciples brings to him. He likes to make and hold eye contact until it makes people nervous.
When Agnes Hayes
sees the boy bagging groceries in the market, her heart surges with pity. His complexion is blotched and infected, his hair long and oily. “Don’t I know you?” she asks, but he doesn’t even look up, his arms all inked with reptiles and knives and what looks like a religious symbol. Now she has spent
the day trying to place him. She taught so many of them but their names and faces run together. In the three years since retirement, she has missed them more than she ever dreamed. Some days she even drives her car and parks near the high school to watch them, to somehow glimpse all that energy and to once again feel it in her own pulse. She still drives Edwin’s copper-colored Electra, and has ever since he died almost two years ago. She would never have retired had she seen his death coming and with it an end to all their plans about where they wanted to go and what they wanted to do. One day she was complaining about plastic golf balls strewn all over the living room and the next she was calling 911 knowing even as she dialed and begged for someone to
please help
that it was too late.
The school is built on the same land where she herself went to school. She had once marched there, her clarinet held in her young hands while she stepped high with the marching band. Edwin’s cigar is there in the ashtray, stinking as always, only now she loves the stink, can’t get enough of it, wishes that she had never complained and made him go out to the garage or down to the basement to smoke. She wishes he were sitting there beside her, ringed in smoke. Their son, Preston, is clear across the country, barely in touch.
Sometimes creepy crawling
involves only the car, cruising slowly through a driveway, headlights turned off, gravel
crunching. There are lots of dogs. Lots of sensor lights. Lots of security systems, or at least the signs that
say
there is a system. The boy trusts nothing and no one. He believes in jiggling knobs and trying windows. When asked one time by a guidance counselor feigning compassion and concern what he did believe in, he said, “Not a goddamn thing.” But, of course, he did. Anyone drawing breath has something he believes in, even if it is only that life sucks and there’s no reason to live. Tonight he has announced that it is Lauren’s turn to prove herself. She is a pretty girl behind the wall of heavy black eye makeup and black studded clothing. She wants out of the car but she owes him fifty dollars. He makes it sound like if she doesn’t pay it back soon he’ll take it out in sex. She is only here in the first place to get back at the boy she loved enough to do everything he asked. She wants him to worry about her, to want her, to think about that night at the campground the way that she does.
The leader reminds her often that he was there for her when no one else was. He listened to her story about the squeaky-clean asshole boyfriend, feeding her sips of cheap wine and stroking her dyed black hair the whole while she cried and talked and later reeled and heaved on all fours in a roadside ditch.
“He’s an asswipe,” the boy had said. “He used you.” And then later when she woke just before dawn with her head pounding and her body filled with the sick knowledge that she had to go home and face her parents, he reminded her again how much she
needed him, couldn’t survive without him. “I didn’t leave you,” he said. “Could’ve easily fucked you and didn’t.”
And now she is here and the boy who broke her heart is out with someone else or maybe just eating dinner with his parents and talking about where he might choose to go to school. He is a boy who always smells clean, even right off the track, where he runs long distance, his thigh muscles like hard ropes, his lungs healthy and strong. He might be at the movies and she wishes she were there, too —the darkness, the popcorn. She wishes she were anywhere else. She had wanted her parents to restrict her after that night, to say she couldn’t go anywhere for weeks and weeks, but they did something so much worse: they said how disappointed they were, that they had given up, how she would have to work really hard to regain their trust, and by
trust
it seems they meant
love
.