Retribution (20 page)

*   *   *

For a boy who had sat on camels in Tunisia and ridden on the roofs of train cars in India, for a boy who was supposed to know the world and would, Rachel knew, leave Tucson behind, Rand was terrible at love. He was slow and uncomprehending when Rachel finally made him sit on his bed, then bent over him and kissed him on the lips. He wouldn't close his eyes and he wouldn't take his glasses off, the cold, thick rims of which gouged at Rachel's cheeks. “I need them to see,” he said, holding them on with both hands. When she blew in and nibbled at his ears, he could only giggle and squirm and struggle out of her arms. And he seemed completely baffled by Rachel's tongue. “It's what you do,” she tried to explain to him. “People kiss with their tongues.”

“I don't know,” Rand said.

“Of course you do. Everybody knows that.”

These were Rachel's first kisses, her first embraces, and she wanted them to count. She wanted to feel desired, ravished, and one afternoon, sitting Indian-style opposite Rand on his bed, she finally insisted. She pulled her T-shirt off and lifted Rand's hands to her breasts and put them over her bra. “Go ahead,” she said. “Do it.”

“Do what?” he asked. He didn't move his hands. They seemed stuck to her smallish breasts, glued there.

“Feel me up,” she said.

“Feel up?” he said.

He didn't even understand the English, so she had to make it simple. “Love me,” she said, after which Rand went mute and just stared at her. “Take your glasses off, Rand.” His eyes looked so pathetic and worried behind his thick lenses that she finally reached over and removed them herself and hid them under the bed. He must have been frozen with fear, because he'd been unable to take his hands from her and defend himself.

“Please,” he said. “I can't see.” He squinted at her and finally did lift an arm and touch her face, softly, the way the blind do, trying to see with his fingers. “Where are my glasses, Rachel?”

“Kiss me,” Rachel said, leaning into him, digging into his lips with hers, pushing a hand down and beginning to pull his belt loose.

“No please,” Rand said. Spit came from his mouth, and when she kissed him now, she felt only his teeth. But her eyes were closed and she was reaching for his crotch, his cock, when he put his hands down and pushed her so forcefully away that she hit the wall behind her with a thud. Her chest felt hollow, as if the force of the impact had emptied her. He shouted out a word in German, a word full of panic and shock. His blond hair was a mess now, as if he'd come in from a windstorm, and his eyes shone with rage and tears and blindness. “Where are my glasses hiding? My glasses!” he shouted.

She got them for him, and when he put them on and could see her again, he seemed to hate her. “Leave,” he said.

“I'm sorry,” Rachel said.

“Out,” he said. “Out.”

When she got up to leave, he threw something at her. It was her shirt, and she picked it up from her feet, put it on, and left.

*   *   *

In the weeks before Christmas, Rand did not speak to her or even look at her at school. In the yearbook office, he'd sit staring at the computer screen even when she would pull a chair up next to him and say, “Hi, Rand. It's me, stupid. It's Rachel. Remember?” He'd just type away or maneuver the mouse. “How's Lisa on the North Pole?” she asked him. When he said nothing, she just sat there and noticed how the chilly blue light from the monitor seeped into Rand's face and made him look frozen and cruel, as if he'd already gone to one of the poles, to the farthest Arctic regions. “Happy holidays and stuff,” she said before going away.

III

One evening Rachel fell asleep in the dark of her room, feeling sick to her stomach, feeling that she'd lost everything, feeling that hunkering down into darkness, into sleep, was her only way to find comfort now. When she woke the next morning, she looked out her window and saw what seemed to be a storm of purple confetti falling from the dark sky. She walked outside in her T-shirt and bare feet, shivering, seeing her breath turn to smoke in the cold air and tasting a crystal of ice on her lip. Snow. Snow in the desert. She'd never seen it, not in Tucson, and she ran down the hall to her mother's bedroom and woke her. “It's snowing,” she said. Her mother, dressed in a simple white nightgown, woke very slowly, as if even this simple act hurt her, and Rachel seemed to have to wait a long time before her mother was ready to hear and understand what she now said again. “It's snowing outside. Look.”

When Carol turned around and looked out the window behind her, she said, “Am I dreaming?”

“Do you want me to pinch you?” Rachel asked.

“Please don't,” she said. Then her mother said, “Oh … oh,” and pointed to her pills on the bedside table.

Rachel poured her water from a pitcher and her mother slowly swallowed three blue gel caps and closed her eyes, concentrating now on the terrible thing inside her. “Is the nurse coming soon?” Rachel asked. A nurse came now every day.

“In an hour,” her mother said. Then she said, her eyes still closed and her head resting on her pillow, “Tell me about something.”

“What?” Rachel hated herself for having nothing to say.

“Anything,” her mother said. “Say anything.”

“I have a boyfriend,” Rachel said. “My first boyfriend.”

Her mother actually smiled. “You've been keeping secrets from me,” she said.

“His name is Rand. It's a funny name, I know, but it's German. He's German, from Germany. He speaks German and everything, and his father's a diplomat, which is why they're in Tucson instead of in Heidelberg. I guess I didn't want to tell anybody right away. I thought he might drop me.”

“Why would you think that?” her mother asked. “I bet he really likes you.”

“Vielleicht,”
Rachel said. “That's German for ‘perhaps.'”

“He's teaching you German?”

“I like him and everything,” Rachel said. “But he's maybe a little pushy sometimes. He wants to do things that I don't want to do yet.”

“Things?” her mother said. She opened her eyes and kept them open. “What things?”

Rachel looked outside at the snow, each flake about the size of a grain of rice, and hated the particular way the truth had worked itself into her lies. She didn't want to hear this truth, but she said it anyway. “You know, sex things. But I'm not ready for that and I told him so, and he still seems to like me.”

“Good,” her mother said. “Good for you. Do we need to have a talk? Would you like to ask me some questions?”

“Not right now,” Rachel said.

Her mother closed her eyes and smiled. “You're a strong girl, Rachel. Very strong.”

Rachel looked out the window again at the strange snow that disappeared as soon as it hit the red dirt ground, the desert, in which it shouldn't have been snowing in the first place. “Lies have long legs,” her mother had always told her. “They run away from you; they chase after you.” But she'd never told Rachel how lonely lies were, how friendless and loveless they made you feel.

Her mother said, “I'm sure he'll be very nice once he calms down.” Then she said with mock disgust, “Boys.”

“Boys,” Rachel said, agreeing.

*   *   *

On the last Wednesday before the semester break, Rachel put a small black tube of lipstick in her backpack and dressed in one of her mother's blouses, which she'd borrowed without asking and which fit her more snugly than anything Rachel owned. Looking in the mirror, she saw that her smallish breasts took on shape and she could just make out the white straps of her bra, the fine lattice of which made her feel both interior and exposed. As she walked through the brown hallways of Our Lady and took in their familiar smells of stinky tennis-shoe leather and pencil erasure, she felt herself distinctly being seen as if the eyes of boys—glancing quickly toward her and just as quickly away—had coated her in a second skin, a sheath of light and uncertain thoughts.

After school, she retreated to her stall in the basement rest room, peed, then wept as loudly as ever, after which she scrawled out an especially graphic message about the Our Lady principal and the director of religious studies. “Father Kelsh does Sister Mariam Anne doggy-style.”
Does
seemed to her even more offensive than the word
fuck,
and she was pleased with what Mr. Cummins, her English teacher, would have called her word choice. But neither her cry nor her message seemed to do much for her that day. She stood from the toilet, pulled her panties up and her skirt down. She had just finished her period and so felt more solid now and less self-conscious in that murky, confused way. In front of the mirror, Rachel took out the black tube of lipstick, the name of which—Secret Rose—had made her think of dew, mists, and light, grainy rainfall, of moister climates than Tucson's. But there was nothing floral about this thick, substantial red, and as she stroked the color on, she seemed to be cutting into her own skin, exposing a soft, wounded depth that she had not guessed at. “Ouch,” she said to herself in the mirror.

When she got into the backseat of the Taurus, Mr. Bobs, his sunglasses off, addressed her in the rearview mirror. “You're first, Rachel.”

She told him right off that she had forgotten her house key that day and that her parents wouldn't return home till later. “They're at the hospital.” How easily that lie had come to her. “I thought maybe I could drive last today,” she said to the slice of eyes and nose in the rearview mirror.

The eyes looked at her, considered her. “Okay,” Mr. Bobs said, his face sliding out of the mirror, where instead she saw a slanted section of the backseat and of her own lap, where her hands, skinny and cut off at the wrists, lay. Then he readjusted the mirror.

Stacy Wallright drove first. She was a little pudgy and drove fearfully, so that Mr. Bobs had to repeat the same stern advice he always reserved for Stacy. “Driving afraid can be just as dangerous as driving recklessly. At the end of the day, the old lady going thirty-five in her Buick on the interstate and the teenager jumping train tracks in his Camaro end up in the same place.” He cleared his throat. “Fear kills, too,” he said.

Why did Mr. Bobs like to talk about death so often? Every time he mentioned it, he'd sit up straighter and puff with authority.

After dropping Stacy off, Jason Brown got behind the wheel. Jason Brown was what Mr. Bobs called an “overconfident” driver. His manner was lax, and today he cruised with the fingers of one hand draped over the wheel, so that Mr. Bobs had to say, “Two hands, Jason. Always two hands on the wheel. If you think you can avoid an accident with a couple of fingers, you're wrong.”

Jason put his other hand on the wheel, though he was slow to do it and clearly felt that it clashed with his style.

Finally, after Jason Brown got out, it was Rachel's turn. Rachel had been labeled a “careless” driver by Mr. Bobs ever since she'd confused the brake for the gas that day, and as she eased into her first turn, she wanted to point out the care she'd just taken. “I followed the five-second rule this time,” Rachel said.

“This is your last practice run,” Mr. Bobs said. “After this, you're on your own.”

“You ever been in an accident, Mr. Bobs?” Rachel asked. “I mean, with Our Lady students.”

“No,” he said. “Never.”

“Probably the closest you came is with me that time.” Mr. Bobs said nothing, and she felt herself achieving a nice hot contempt for this man who had been ignoring her now for weeks. “Guess what?”

Mr. Bobs didn't say anything to this, save for “Take a right turn on Mesa Drive.”

“I took your picture a few weeks ago.”

“My picture?” Mr. Bobs said. Rachel looked over at him, expecting him to engage her now, though he didn't. He faced straight ahead, with his large shieldlike glasses on, as if it would be dangerous for him to turn and look at her.

“On the football field last week,” she said. “I'm the school sports photographer. You're going to be in the yearbook.”

“All right,” he said, “we'll take a few left-hand turns and then finish up.”

“You seemed angry, the way you were shouting at those boys to hit one another. Are you angry, Mr. Bobs?” He took a deep, irritated breath. “Anyway, the way you were shouting made me think about something for some reason. I thought about Mrs. Bobs, about the way she left and everything, about how furious you must have been when she did that.”

Mr. Bobs was looking at her now, though she couldn't know what was in his eyes—rage, shock—behind those silly glasses. “We're having a driving lesson,” he said. “Not a conversation.”

She hated the coldness, the indifference in his voice. She wanted him to be angry or hurt, to yell or cry. “The other week,” she said, “we were having a conversation. We talked about what music I liked, about how lonely I seemed, about my mother.”

“No,” Mr. Bobs said, his voice still calm and chilly. “We didn't. I don't remember any such conversation.”

“You touched me,” Rachel said. “You put a hand on my shoulder.”

“No,” Mr. Bobs said. “I didn't.” Then he said, “Take a right at this light.”

“Sure,” Rachel said, pulling into the left lane and taking a left turn onto a quiet residential street.

“I said right,” Mr. Bobs said.

“No you didn't,” Rachel said. “You said left. You said to take a left turn at the light.”

“Take a right here and turn around,” he said calmly, as if none of this were happening.

Rachel turned left again and drove farther into the quiet neighborhood of rock yards and chain-link fences. “You used to look at me,” Rachel said. “And every time you did it behind your glasses, I knew it. I felt it.”