Swim Back to Me (15 page)

Shouldn’t do it.

Couldn’t, shouldn’t, couldn’t, shouldn’t.

He stretched for the child, grabbed him, and threw him away from the tracks. Slipped and was struck
.

So said the witness, a man who’d pulled over to see what was going on, why a tall, dark-haired teenager was scrambling from a car to race for the tracks when a train was coming …

She stared at the tracks now. Sunlight reflecting blood-brown on steel. A howl through her mind:
Don’t
.

She was so thirsty. She set her blinker though no one was coming, then turned onto the street and pulled to the curb in front of the house.

It was small, white, neatly kept. She cut the engine and the stereo fell silent. Maybe no one was home. There was a metal garbage can empty at the curb, which might mean no one was home. Or might not.

She walked up the edge of the driveway. A mass of Johnny-jump-ups grew against the porch: blossoms of dark purple and pale purple and yellow, tiny and so tender.

She stepped onto the porch and the door knocker galvanized her: brass molded into the words “Bless Our Home.” Bless it yourself, she thought nastily.

She rapped once, hard. It was two-thirty in the afternoon, maybe little Tyler was asleep. Down for his nap.
Do you want me to put him down?
Dave said, taking the baby Ben from Kathryn and setting him in his crib. Then, murmuring to the baby:
Now why did I say that, hmm? We certainly don’t want you to feel put down
.

The door opened, and there stood a woman, thirtyish, narrow-shouldered. She furrowed her brow and stared at Kathryn, then looked out to the curb, where Kathryn had parked the Trooper—the car Ben had been driving that day. Kathryn saw it dawn on the woman, the understanding of who she was.

She peered past the woman into the house. Beige carpeting, a sectional couch in front of a giant entertainment center. The woman’s eyes were wide now, her hands knotted together just below her bustline. She still hadn’t spoken.

“I came,” Kathryn said, but then she stopped. Her mouth was a desert. She sucked her cheeks for some saliva, a way to talk. “I came,” she said, “to tell you that I’m sorry he did it.” She leaned closer to the woman. To Janette McCormick. Round blue eyes, wispy eyebrows, putty pink skin.

“I’m sorry he stopped,” she went on. “I wish he’d kept on driving.”

The woman opened her mouth, then closed it again. Blood sloshed around inside Kathryn’s head. The skin around her mouth tingled. Time passed, a second or a minute or ten.

Behind her the day sat still, waiting. Deep blue sky beyond the shade trees. She looked down and saw the woman’s feet in flowered Keds, the toe of one shoe covering the toe of the other.

Kathryn turned and walked back to her car. Her big, expensive silver Isuzu Trooper. A train of a car. She was still being watched, but then she heard the door close, and she imagined the woman pressing her back against it, sobbing into her hands.

Settled in the driver’s seat, Kathryn started the engine, and the CD started, too, right where it had left off.
I tried to dance at a funeral, New Orleans style. I joined the grave dancers’ union, I had to file. Standing in the sun with a popsicle, everything is possible. With a lot of luck and a pretty face, and some time to waste. Leave without a trace. Leave without a trace. Leave. Without. A trace
.

And the instruments burst into conversation, bright and brave and onward, even knowing they’d soon stop. Kathryn pulled away from the curb. She reached for the volume knob and turned it up. No: she
cranked
it.

For DSD

Jump

A
lejandro was thin like a teenager, with skinny shoulders and skinny legs and no butt. His black hair lay against his scalp in long, wavy strands and hung so low on his forehead it almost reached his eyes. “I got cables,” he cried in response to Carolee’s announcement, his hand up and waving like a school kid’s. “I can help you.”

It was a little after midnight, and her car was dead. Beggars weren’t supposed to be choosers, but did she really want Alejandro’s help? Here at work he messed up all the time, making a hundred fifty copies when a customer wanted fifteen, jamming the self-service machines when he tried to add paper. She couldn’t believe he hadn’t been fired.

“What’s the matter, Carolee?” one of the other guys said. “Alejandro said he can help.”

Alejandro turned away, eyes downcast, front teeth pulling at his lower lip. She’d trained him when he first started, almost a year ago, and she felt sort of responsible for him. It wasn’t just that she’d been around longer than he had—she’d been around longer than anyone, including her boss. It was more, he was the runt of the litter and she hated watching anyone get bullied.

She gave him a swift nod and they headed for the exit, Alejandro trotting beside her and then darting ahead to push open the door. “Yo, Chavez,” someone called after them. “No funny business.”

The moon was high and bright, and a cold wind blew bits of debris around the nearly empty parking lot. Carolee turned up the lapels of her flimsy jacket and clutched them close. She hated her heavy coat so much she’d ditched it at the first false note of spring.

They began walking. An empty Vitamin Water bottle lay in their path, and Alejandro paused, raised his foot high, and gave her a huge grin when he saw he’d flattened it. He said, “You’re lucky I’m even here tonight. Usually on Fridays I’m wit my friends doin’ airsoft.”

“Airsoft.”

He stared at her with disbelief, his thin face pinched from the cold. He had smooth olive cheeks and the beginnings of a fine, silky mustache that never seemed to grow. He said, “Carolee, you gotta be kiddin’. It’s guns—Not real—It’s so fun, you gotta go wit me sometime.”

He told her about the empty shopping mall where he and his buddies played late at night, its businesses shuttered, a giant “For Lease” sign facing the highway. There were recessed doorways perfect for ambushes, vacant loading docks. He said, “My boy Gordo’s a security guard, he lets us in.”

“Hope he doesn’t like his job,” Carolee said.

“Why, cuz he could lose it? Gordo’s smart, he ain’t gonna get caught.”

He was parked at the far end of the lot, his boxy old Nissan just a few spaces from her battered Hyundai. By the time they got there she had to pee, though she’d peed right before she clocked out, like ten minutes ago.

He swung open his trunk. “Fuck me.”

Inside were a bicycle wheel lying on its side, a mess of dirty clothes, a six-pack of off-brand cola. No jumper cables.

“I know I had ’em,” he said. “Somebody musta stole ’em.”

She turned to go. She had a theory that any one bad thing made it likelier more bad things would happen. Her dead car had set her up. She said, “I’ll figure something else out.”

“Carolee, no, we can go borrow some. Gordo has some.”

“It’s fine, Alejandro.”

“Or I can drive you home and go get ’em after, bring you back tomorrow. You workin’ tomorrow?”

She wasn’t. And she really had to pee, the feeling like a knife slice now, which was not good. Plus it was incredibly cold. In the morning she could probably find someone with cables at her apartment, get a ride back up here and deal with her car then. All she was supposed to do tomorrow was stop by her mom’s. There was some project her mom had in mind for the two of them, labeling photos, reorganizing a closet—the kind of thing Carolee thought of as playing with the past, as if the past were a doll and the two of them were putting dress-up clothes on it, combing its hair so it would look pretty.

She said to Alejandro, “I live in Sunnyvale.”

He shrugged and opened the passenger door for her, and she got in, the car smelling of old French fries and air freshener. He settled into the driver’s seat and wiggled his eyebrows at her. “Finally I get you in my car.”

“Do
not
do that.”

He held up both palms, then backed away from the curb and drove straight across the painted lines of a dozen parking places. Leaving the lot, he gave her a worried glance from under the fringe of his hair and faced the road again.

Now she felt bad; he was just doing what guys did. And he looked so hangdog, slumped in the seat, steering with the heel of one hand.

She said, “So this airsoft war. It’s teams?”

He looked over and grinned. “Every man for himself.”

“But you help Juan.”

“I help Juan and Iggy. Gordo helps me.”

“Gordo helps you but you don’t help him?”

“He don’t need help.”

And on he went, like the little kids she used to babysit, who talked and talked, and then talked more as bedtime got closer. He basically was a kid: twenty-two at the most, whereas she’d turn thirty in less than a month, and what a good time that was going to be. Her mom kept saying they’d go out somewhere really nice, just the two of them, like that was the solution and not the problem.

They drove past a gas station, and Carolee wondered if she should offer to buy him some. “You got a full tank?”

“Yeah.”

Another gas station, complete with a big bright mini-mart.

“Can we stop for a sec?”

“I said I’m good.”

“Not for gas.”

He turned to her with wide eyes. “Carolee, no. You’re my role model, you can’t smoke.”

“I don’t smoke. You can keep it running, I’ll only be a sec.”

The cashier was an old guy, sitting on a stool with his neck arched so he could watch a TV mounted to the ceiling. Carolee ducked into the bathroom. It was dank and freezing, with scattered puddles on the concrete floor. There was nowhere she wanted to put her purse, so she held the strap between her teeth as she lowered her thighs to the frigid seat. At first it felt good letting the urine out, but as she finished it burned, a sure sign, and she knew she had a bad night ahead.

The store light was bright and ugly. She found the grocery aisle and scanned the shelves, hating the way boxes of food looked in these places, the yellows and cardboard reds.

Alejandro stood empty-handed at the register, leaning on one elbow. When he saw her he straightened up. “What you got, juice?”

She flashed the label at him.

“Cranberry juice. Guess you got a infection, huh?”

“Alejandro!” She set the juice on the counter and fished in her purse. In the mirror behind the register she saw how she towered over him, all 5′10″ of her. She felt like his mother.

She opened her wallet, and he reached across her to a plastic tub of Slim Jims. He said, “On you? Thanks, boss.”

“I’m not your boss.”

“You are. You’re my boss lady.”

It seemed even colder when they got back outside. She hated “boss lady.” She was shift manager, which—despite the flowchart she’d made for the online business class she took a few years back—meant next to nothing. Shift manager at the idiotically named Copy Copy, her thirtieth birthday coming soon—she was kicking ass.

Back in the car, she unscrewed the top of the cranberry juice and drank from its too-wide opening, the juice sweet-sharp, with that drying effect. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

He said, “Carolee, I hate to tell you, cranberry juice ain’t gonna fix it.”

She looked over at him, sitting behind the wheel, a serious look on his face. “You’re a doctor now?”

He shrugged and sat there nibbling on the Slim Jim. Another car pulled in next to them, and the driver got out, a man in his fifties with thick, disheveled hair and the ruined nose of an alcoholic. He spoke through his open door, waving his hand like he was excited or upset, and when he moved away Carolee got a quick glimpse of his passenger, a black and white mutt with floppy ears.

She’d left clothes in the washer, she just remembered. Put them in last night when she got home from work and forgot all about them. Evenings she worked late, she was sometimes so fried she didn’t even eat, or she ate crap from the freezer, Hot Pockets, Bagel Bites, stuff she bought for emergencies. Her laundry would’ve been taken from the washer by now, left wet in her basket if she was lucky or just dumped on the floor. She hated her apartment. Every now and then she thought of trying to move north, closer to work, but it was like the idea of signing up for some classes again—it wouldn’t make a big enough difference, so why bother?

She turned to Alejandro. “So are we going?”

He didn’t respond, his expression glazed, the Slim Jim drooping from the corner of his mouth.

“Yo,” she said.

“What?”

“Are we going?”

He shook, or shivered—it was like a wet dog trying to dry off. Moving slowly, he started the car, put it in reverse, and pulled out of the gas station, but when he came to the on-ramp for the freeway he turned right.

“Wait, what’re you—”

“Shortcut.”

There was no shortcut to Sunnyvale, and her pulse picked up a little. Was this going to turn into one of those horrible stories, woman killed by coworker on deserted street? She thought of a Monday morning when she’d gotten to work early, and Alejandro and the other night-shift guy were sitting on opposite counters, tossing a roll of packing tape back and forth. When he saw her he hopped down and gave her a big smile. “Hey, Carolee,” he said, “come and kiss me, just right here”—he tapped his cheek twice—“ ’cause I know you love me.”

He wasn’t a maniac. A fuck-up but not a maniac. And maybe not such a fuck-up, either—for him he was probably doing well, just having his job. She was pretty sure he was first-generation, with parents who didn’t speak English.

She was in pain again, and she shifted in her seat, trying to get comfortable. She had swiped some sleeping pills from her mom’s medicine cabinet, and this was definitely the night to try one. Either that or lie awake watching the clock. She was pretty sure Kaiser opened at 9:00 on Saturdays. At 9:01 she’d call for some Cipro.

He said, “What you doing tomorrow?”

“Nothing. Dealing with my car.” Maybe she’d skip the stop at her mom’s, though then she’d have to hear the usual moaning,
What’s the point of having you close by if I never see you?

“No, after that,” Alejandro said. “Later. We should go out. You wanna go to a movie? I ain’t hittin’ on you, I swear.”

She glanced over at him, sitting there all thin and hopeful. Did he really think she’d go out with him, even as friends? They were so different: age, race, everything. What would they talk about, airsoft wars? She said, “You’ve got to be kidding.”

He stared straight ahead, hands tight on the steering wheel.

She said, “What?”

“Why are you such an icicle, lady?”

“I’m sorry.” She hesitated. “It’s late. Don’t listen to me.”

On they drove, past heavy trees on one side of the road and a big wall on the other. The streetlights were far apart, and they were the fancy kind, with curly iron things spiraling on top of the globes. At a T intersection, she looked in both directions and saw more walls, more trees.