Q Road (33 page)

She'd thought marriage would make her want to do simple things such as bake cakes. She had thought that marriage would make life richer—just the knowledge that the man she loved had committed to her should make every moment sparkle. Surely Steve had promised her that life with him would be warm and fun. But instead it was … God, she didn't even have the words to describe what her life felt like. Over the course of several hours of any day, she felt sad, happy, hurt, then vulnerable, then self-confident. Each day she wove the threads of those emotions into a fabric to wrap around herself, but for all that, she thought she might never be able to express another meaningful idea to anyone else ever again. By getting married, she'd put herself on the shelf, and other people
now saw her as taken care of, finished off. She'd planned and executed her wedding, and she'd done a fabulous job—everybody said so—but rather than a fresh new start on life, the wedding had turned out to be the beginning of the end. If she didn't do something that made a difference soon, then in thirty years she would be another gloomy old lady staring out of her house at a world that confounded her.

Nicole got up, and in her heart-patterned flannel pajamas, she walked into and out of all the rooms of her little house, including the smaller bedroom, which was Steve's home office, and she ended up in the kitchen, where she stood for a long time before she grabbed the biggest knife from the knife holder and carried it toward Steve. As she crossed the threshold between the living room and the bedroom, she grasped the handle with both hands, and as she approached the bed, she extended her arms straight out in front of her. She studied the big, dumb body of her husband and imagined she could see beads of sweat excreted from his pores. His hair was flattened on the side of his head, and his mouth hung open. His exposed arm looked flabby in sleep. She had hoped that this man could mean everything to her. She was fully aware that she would never be able to explain to her mother or anyone else how murder was the only remedy for her situation. She positioned the knife directly above his chest. She lifted her arms and felt all the forces of the universe collect in her tensed muscles. At the top of her thrust, the clock snapped from 1:52 to 1:53 and she awoke from her trance, a princess of a bride transformed into an aging married woman with bleached hair and a blotchy complexion. She let her arms drop to her sides.

She hurried out of the bedroom, through the living room and kitchen, to the sliding glass door and outside onto the plank deck. She knew that killing Steve was a fantasy, just as her idea of a perfect marriage had been a fantasy, the way her white house with a view of a barn and a bridge over a stream amounted to nothing more than
a puff of smoke. On the picnic table before her sat the two pumpkins Steve had brought home earlier. Only now did she consider it was pretty impressive that he'd carried them all that distance from the Barn Grill. She went to the bigger of the two, and without hesitation stabbed it with all the strength in both her arms. With that thrust, she felt something snap in her chest, something like a popcorn kernel popping. It required some force to yank the knife out. She positioned herself over the pumpkin and stabbed it again. When she freed the knife, the pumpkin toppled to the wooden deck. She got down on her knees and stabbed it, again and again, through its ribs, and as she sliced, her white breath fanned from her nose and mouth. The pumpkin rolled over and she stabbed it while it lay on its back. The next attempt missed the pumpkin entirely; she thrust the knife between two boards of the deck. When she looked up, she saw her husband standing in the doorway.

He swallowed audibly. “What are you doing, honey?”

“Carving this pumpkin.” She was a little out of breath.

“It looked like you were stabbing it.”

“I guess I slipped.” She lifted the knife one more time, thrust it into the pumpkin, and left it there.

Steve laughed nervously and shifted his weight to his other bare foot. Beneath his T-shirt, his stomach extended over the waistband of his boxers. When he noticed her looking, he sucked it in. He said, “Aren't you cold?”

Nicole hadn't even noticed that her pajama sleeves had ridden up. Her forearms were goose-bumped and steam seemed to be rising from her skin. Steve tilted his head in a way that signaled he was good-natured, but the gesture seemed forced.

“Tomorrow,” he said, and cleared his throat. “Tomorrow I'm going to offer to help George Harland with his farming. Milton at the Barn Grill told me that the guy who worked for him moved to Indiana and left him in a bind. He could lose the whole place.”

Nicole was eyeing the knife, wondering if she should pull it out
and stab the pumpkin one last time tonight. Or maybe she'd wait until tomorrow, and then do some serious carving.

“If he loses the farm, we might end up living next to a subdivision. I think I'd be good at it, you know,” Steve said. “Farming. I'm going to offer to help him however I can. Then I figure when he needs windows he'll come to me.”

She said, “Do you think I should bake them a cake or something?”

“You know, cake would sure hit the spot right now.”

“Maybe I'll make two cakes, one for us.”

Steve said, “Did I ever tell you I took home ec in school? We made cakes, pizzas, cookies, you name it.”

“You took home ec?”

“Just the cooking part. I was about the only guy in the class.”

Nicole said, “I don't know if we have all the ingredients.”

“Flour, baking powder, sugar, milk, butter.”

“Eggs. Chocolate, maybe.”

They went inside just before Rachel came out from the side door across the street.

RACHEL CARRIED HER GUN THROUGH THE KITCHEN AND
mudroom. When she opened the side door, cold air rushed her. Standing three steps below her was the spirit she'd conjured up, the ghost of David Retakker. Though the haze had hung on through the day, the night sky above the stock barn and pasture was dark and clear, hungry for its new moon. David Retakker's ghost looked pale and grubby. It was breathing hard, and it scratched its armpit, looked at the ground, and said nothing. For a moment, Rachel herself couldn't breathe, but then she inhaled the cold air too deeply and choked. She didn't look away because she didn't trust this silent apparition not to disappear. It refused to look up at her. She lifted her rifle and looked at the ghost over the sights.

“Damn you, David!” Rachel said. “What the hell were you thinking?” She had no intention of firing, but when she heard the raccoon rustling near the mouth of the stock barn where the pumpkins
and apples were, her sighting, shooting, and pulling the trigger were all one motion. Because she hadn't been prepared to fire, the shriek of the bullet made her jump.

“Don't kill me!” David screamed. And in the same moment, the raccoon beyond him squeaked and died. The shot must have missed David by inches. Rachel threw the gun down onto the wet grass.

She descended the cold cement stairs in her bare feet and when she reached David she hauled off and smacked his dirt-smeared face. He was solid. He stumbled and regained his balance and then looked at her as though willing her to smack him again, so she did. As her hand struck his ear he yelped. David's long-sleeved T-shirt was covered with burrs and sticktights. He still wore no jacket, though it was cold enough that breath poured out his nostrils and mouth. Her relief at his being alive threatened to buoy her, but she pushed that aside. She grabbed his shoulders and began to shake him. “Damn you!” She couldn't think of what to say. “And what about the cows?” she said, and with both hands thrust his body to the ground. David lifted himself onto his elbows and looked up at her from the grass and dirt. She kicked him twice in the ribs with her bare foot, and the second kick must have hurt him because it hurt her middle toes. Though he squirmed away from her, he did not fight back. She kicked him again, in the hipbone, and this time hurt the top of her foot enough that she'd have a bruise.

David knew that if he could endure Rachel hitting and kicking him, he could stand anything. He wouldn't defend himself, and he wouldn't complain or cry. Except that he already was crying. He could hardly inhale and his ankle throbbed and so did the lump on his shin. His wrists and armpits had started to itch already from the poison ivy; his chest muscles ached. He hoped Rachel would not pick up her gun and shoot him.

“Stand up!” she yelled. “Stand up, you little son of a bitch!”

When he stood, Rachel slapped his face again, though with little force. “How could you?” She shook his shoulders. “How could you?”

Only when she noticed he was crying did Rachel realize that she was crying too. She stopped shaking him and said, “You ruined everything. You have no idea about that barn.” Yet it sounded dumb, what she was saying, because really she'd been thinking that David himself had been in that barn, that
he
was the great loss. Now that he was resurrected from the fire, she could see how the barn had been nothing more than a sorry-ass building, a giant wooden grave marker, a rotting blemish on the otherwise perfect landscape.

“I'm sorry,” David said.

“You're sorry.” Rachel laughed and looked up at the moonless sky. “You burn down a hundred-and-thirty-year-old barn full of straw and hay and a wagon and nearly kill your goddamn self and you're sorry. You're the sorriest kid I ever knew.” She was thinking about the other bedroom on the second floor—not the one with the Indian garden drawings, but the one with less junk. They'd need to put plastic on the windows before winter, because it had been cold in there last year. She and David could do that.

Rachel's bare feet were growing numb from the wet grass. She was thinking that if George died in his sleep, she could walk down the hall and push open the door to the room that would be David's and wake David up and sit on the edge of his bed, and when she told him what they were going to do next, then she would know.

David, for his part, felt exhausted, more exhausted than ever in his life, as if his body no longer had the energy to expand his lungs or to distill the oxygen from the poorly mixed air of this night, and he told himself again that if he could survive tonight, he could survive anything, even living in the woods eating berries and walnuts
and wild creatures. When Rachel let go of his shoulders, he braced himself to be punched, but instead Rachel pulled his face into her shoulder and hugged him, and David took comfort in her warmth and in the smell of George that permeated the flannel shirt she was wearing.

Rachel felt stupidly happy with her arms around David's shoulder blades and backbone. She felt happy despite her mother being gone, probably forever, despite the wreckage of the fire, despite knowing that George would die beside her. She just felt glad standing here on the land she loved, hugging this sorry kid brought back to the living.

Rachel said, “Since you destroyed the cows' barn, you'll have to help me make a new cow pen. And we've both got to somehow help George bring in the corn and beans because he can't do it himself.” After all, Rachel thought, Corn Girl harvested corn.

“I'm sorry,” David repeated, now bawling in earnest, gagging and wheezing, struggling against Rachel's arms to lift his face and breathe. “I'm so sorry.”

Rachel loosened her embrace and rested her chin on top of David's head to look behind the house toward her garden mounds, where pumpkin stems lay tangled. She envisioned David's big-knuckled hands reaching down and cutting the stems with the small machete and carrying them up to the wagon one by one, his body straining. She hadn't been all that strong at twelve either, she supposed. This winter David could help her build a new Indian garden in the shape of a wagon wheel. He'd stand in the center, holding the end of a fifty-yard length of twine, while Rachel measured out the spokes of a giant wheel, maybe beside the river, or maybe on the site of the burned-down barn. Rachel imagined David weeding her garden and driving tractors across hay fields, eating dinner with her and George at the round kitchen table, passing the potatoes, busting up the silence of their meals with stupid questions and stupid comments.

She decided to leave the dead raccoon on the ground. She didn't feel like skinning out anything tonight. If it was still there in the morning, she'd bury it in her garden.

“Are you hungry, David?” she asked. “You look pretty damn hungry.”