Retribution (21 page)

“Are you threatening me?” Mr. Bobs asked. They drove past a Mormon church, where a man wearing a suit and tie and holding rolls of new toilet paper stacked in his arms struggled to enter the large front doors. One of the rolls toppled from the stack and sped over the sidewalk behind him. “Are you?”

“In the pictures I took of you,” Rachel continued, “you've got your mouth open because you're shouting at the boys in front of you to bash their helmets together. And even though you look mad and crazy with anger, you look sad, too, because it seems like you're too angry, if you know what I mean. Angrier than a football coach should be. I've got a title,” Rachel said. “It's called
The General,
or maybe
The General's Secret.
It's going to be the first photograph of the sports section.” Then she said, “I'm not threatening you. I don't think I am, anyway.”

“Jesus,” Mr. Bobs said, laughing, though it wasn't a pleasant laugh. And when Rachel turned to look at him, he had taken his glasses off and was wiping the sweat from his forehead. “First of all, I never looked at you. Not once. And if you're planning to tell people I did, you'd better think again.”

He looked exhausted, run-down, and Rachel suddenly remembered what she'd wanted to know from him. “What did it feel like,” she asked, “when your wife left you? Afterward, I mean. When the house was empty. When you knew she was gone forever.”

“Stop the car,” Mr. Bobs said in a fierce whisper. “Stop the stupid car.”

“No,” Rachel said. Mr. Bobs was angry now. Thank God he was angry, furious. “We're having a driving lesson, aren't we?”

“You have two seconds to stop the car.” When Rachel kept driving, Mr. Bobs slammed the brake pedal down on his side and they came to a screeching stop. He reached over and began wrestling Rachel for the keys, their hands interlocking.

“You're touching me. Stop touching me,” Rachel yelled. He withdrew then, jerking back as if stung, though somehow he'd ended up with the keys.

“I'm going to give you bus money,” Mr. Bobs said, digging in his pocket. “And you're going to get out right here.”

“It must have hurt a lot,” Rachel said. “Or maybe you didn't feel anything. Maybe you went around the house pulling all the empty drawers out, opening her closet and just looking into the space left by everything she took away, while you tried to feel something.”

Mr. Bobs was holding money out to her, his hands shaking. “Get the hell out.”

Rachel didn't really hate him anymore, but she had planned to hate him and she had wanted to hate him. So she said it. “You're an asshole, Mr. Bobs. You're a dirty, messy asshole.” She pulled the Mace out of her front pocket, pointed it at him, and watched Mr. Bobs's face grow puzzled, then frightened.

“What?” he said.

“Bang!” she said, spraying him. He exhaled, as if all at once deflating, and folded up into his lap. Rachel felt her throat clench from the fumes and put her hand to her mouth as she looked down at his back. “Mr. Bobs,” Rachel said through her hand. “Say something.” He made a sound, a deep sound that did not seem human and that prompted her to touch him softly on the shoulder, where she felt his muscles quivering, where she felt what must have been his suffering. She wanted to say his first name then, to call him out of his pain with something more familiar—Robert or Earl or Dennis. But she didn't know it. She didn't know anything about this man she'd just hurt. So she said again, “Mr. Bobs. Please.” He moved away from her touch and somehow let himself out of the car, dropping to the asphalt. She heard the noise of the keys he'd just snatched from her hit the ground and saw him roll over onto his back. His closed eyes streamed with tears. “Mr. Bobs,” she said, now standing above him. He had begun to breathe again and she wanted to call for help, but she was too afraid of what she'd done. It was then that she noticed the children staring at her from the rock garden of the house directly in front of her. “I didn't do it,” she said. They said nothing in return and she saw then that they were lawn ornaments—a little boy with a corncob pipe in his mouth and a fishing rod in his hand and a little girl with a red smile on her face, wearing a heavy winter coat and supporting a satchel of schoolbooks on her back. “Oh,” she said to them. She looked at the house in front of her, a small adobe structure, and saw herself cut off at the waist and reflected in the sun-splashed glass of its single front window. No one had seen. No one had been looking. Not even a single car was driving along this road, though Rachel could hear the rushing traffic of Tucson like the sound of a river somewhere beyond the houses, the sound of the whole world, where people ate octopus, where Africans played in the dirt, where Arabs road off on camels into their strange, endless desert of sand dunes, where girls and their families picnicked on polar ice caps, the world at the quiet center of which Rachel now stood, only to see that it was dead. The world was dead. It didn't seem to care if you were a terrible person who did terrible things. It didn't seem to care about anything. It was just there, inexplicably there.

Mr. Bobs had gotten to his knees, leaned his chest against the car's front fender, fisting and unfisting one of his hands. Rachel knew she had better be gone by the time he got to his feet. She picked up Mr. Bobs's silver whistle on its yellow nylon cord—it had fallen off his neck—and put it in her pocket. This small theft seemed to count for nothing now that she had done so much worse. And when she had walked a block and turned the corner and walked three or four more blocks, she put the whistle around her neck, held it between her lips, and blew on it long and hard. She blew on it until its shrill sound ripped across the sky. She blew on it until the houses in this dead, dead neighborhood came to life a little, until a small boy stepped out of a screen door in a pair of blue flip-flops and white underwear and stared at her, until an old man appeared behind the gray glass of his living room window and touched it with his hand, as if he were captive there and wanted out, until a housewife came out on her porch smoking a cigarette and drying a serving platter with a dishrag, looking unhappy, bored, and finally unimpressed by Rachel's whistling, until a bare-chested Latino man with the word
amigo
tattooed in red letters across his chest stood up from the porch steps where he'd been sitting and gave her a military salute, and until the neighborhood dogs threw themselves against the chain-link fences of their backyards and howled because it must have hurt them to hear the long, senseless scream of her whistle. She blew on it until she grew light-headed and dark spots hovered in the air before her and she almost blacked out and fell into a soft oblivion that seemed to have opened at her shoulder, ready to receive her forever, and until, finally, she did not black out and oblivion did not swallow her and no one did anything except look, then look away, which was when she stopped, put the stupid whistle back in her pocket, and walked on.

IV

During the three-week Christmas break, Rachel waited for the police to come to her door with a warrant, or for the phone to ring, or for Father Kelsh to send a notice of her expulsion, or for Mr. Bobs himself to pound at their front door and scream out her name. But days passed and no one came, and Rachel woke in the dark mornings with a numb heart. The one time she had hurt another person, hurt him physically and without mercy, she hadn't hated him. Now she was left feeling empty and abandoned, just as she might have felt had she had sex with a boy who'd meant nothing to her. Maybe love and hate were the same in this respect. Maybe both were difficult to achieve.

Rachel's mother was surprisingly alert and well on Christmas morning. Rachel received a red Lands' End light winter coat and toothpaste, toothbrushes, Maxi hair gel, Mabeline mascara and blush, three different shades of lipstick, and, the one concession to her fading childhood, a Duncan glow-in-the-dark yo-yo that shone a milky white when they turned out the lights. Her father had done all the shopping, and the presents he gave and wrapped for himself were remarkably like the ones he'd received for years now: a necktie with red unicycles on it, a bar of Old Spice soap-on-a-rope, three boxes of Spalding Ace 1 golf balls (one of the few gifts he would actually use), and the last, a large and totally unexpected item, a “Build a ship in a bottle” kit. “I always thought ships in bottles were sort of neat and mysterious,” he said. “So I thought, What the hell.” The box showed an old sailing ship, the sort that Christopher Columbus and the Pilgrims had used, held inside a large corked bottle. “Mysterious,” her father said again, looking at the box.

Rachel's mother opened presents last. She pulled almond Kisses and chocolate caramels from her stocking, though they all knew she had lost her appetite for sweets long ago. “Thank you,” she said. She pulled out barrettes and combs for her hair, which had been growing back thickly in the months since her chemo had stopped. Rachel's father began crying very silently—the first time he'd cried openly in front of both Rachel and her mother. “Merry Christmas anyway.” He laughed as the tears came down. “Ho, ho, ho,” he said, trying to smile. Rachel's mother pulled a huge feather pillow from a box. “Thank you,” she said, putting it in her lap and beginning to open another, which turned out to be a square of cloth with strange attachments and a pocket in it. “That's a phone pocket,” he explained. “It attaches to the arm of your wheelchair and you put the cordless in the pocket. That way, the phone's always at your side.” Rachel was appalled. Her mother was not yet in a wheelchair and these things—the pillow and the phone pocket—were meant to help her die. Her mother just smiled. “Thank you both,” she said.

“Merry Christmas,” her father said.

“Merry Christmas,” Rachel heard herself say.

*   *   *

On New Year's Day, the doorbell rang in the middle of the afternoon and Rachel knew it was them—the police had come to question her, the police, with Mr. Bobs or Father Kelsh or both. But when she looked through the peephole, she saw Rand, his smiling face warped and pulled into a cone by the glass. “You can't be here,” she said through the door.

“Hi,” he said. “Happy New Year. Please open up.”

“No.”

“Please,” he said, and she finally did open the door.

“You have to go,” Rachel said. She felt the presence of her mother just down the hall, dying behind the half-open door of her bedroom. It was obscene. “I'm sorry.” He opened his mouth just as she closed the door and cut off the desperate sound of her name—
“Rachel!”
He knocked, then knocked again, and Rachel went around to the living room window and watched him, tall and skinny, stare at the front door and kick at the concrete with his tennis shoe a few times before he turned around and left.

The next day, the doorbell rang again. “I told you that you couldn't come here.”

Rand began to speak rapidly in German, and the flow of that strange language on the long, sorrowful thread of Rand's voice kept her from closing the door. “I am sorry,” he finally said in English.

“You can't come in,” Rachel said. “But maybe I can come out.” Rachel hadn't left the house for days, and she squinted in the bright light. The desert air seemed cold and raw. She had to hug her arms to keep warm, and the crumbly sidewalk stung her bare feet.

“You maybe want to put shoes on,” Rand said.

“No. No I don't.” She felt the sharp edge of everything then, and she liked it. Even the grass on the front lawn of the nearby church—the only grass in Rachel's neighborhood—felt individual and prickly when she sat down and leaned against her palms. Some cats came to bother them, slinking against their legs, and Rachel pushed them away.

“There is something mean about you,” Rand said.

“Yep,” Rachel said. “I know. So why did you come back to see me?”

Rand smiled, showing his teeth. He wore a T-shirt that said
READ BOOKS
in large red letters, and Rachel thought she loved him then, his intelligence, his knowledge of the world, his taste for octopus, that ugly sea creature, the large, generous smile he directed at her now, despite the fact that she was mean. “I am missing you,” he said. “I am missing our English lessons. Lisa on the North Pole is asking about you. I am wondering about your pictures, your dark photographs. I miss them, too.” They were silent for a while and lay on their backs and looked into the cloudless, cold sky. “My family and I are going away at the end of the summer,” Rand said. “To Rio.”

“I thought so,” Rachel said, still looking into the simple blue sky that seemed to obliterate the drama of facing the funny, dangly-limbed, foreign boy whom she liked too much to ever let go. They were just voices speaking out of the air, and that made things easier to hear and say. “I need to tell you something,” she said. “But I can't say it in my language. Would you teach me some words?”

“A German lesson?” he asked.

“Please.” She asked him the word for
dying,
the word for
my,
the word—the most difficult word—for
mother.
The German was strange and seemed to break apart in her mouth, and before she could finish constructing her crumbling sentence, Rand knew.

“Oh,” he said. “Oh.”

“Yep,” Rachel said.

“Can I help you?” Rand asked. He had sat up on the grass, and Rachel, who hadn't moved, could make out from the side of her eyes his torso slanting hugely above her, taking up half the sky. She had to look away.

“I don't think so,” she said.

*   *   *

When school started again in January, something seemed different, though Rachel could not guess what it was. The shabby brown halls lined with gray padlocked lockers seemed unchanged. The stink of shoe leather and pencil erasure was the same. Perhaps her classmates had grown taller and more greasy-faced; teenagers were always growing and sprouting pimples, and Rachel herself felt a new and painful constellation of zits coming in above her nose. And her bra had become snug; its little hook bit into her soft back, and somehow she would soon have to ask her grieving father to buy her the next size up. How would she even begin to mention her growing breasts to him?