Authors: Robert Zimmerman
I have known that the end of the world isn't coming as prophesied, not crisped to the rib edge of a nuclear winter but rather nestled sleepily in the breast of a turgid fall. For a moment, as the echo of that one toll flutters my hair like the sea breeze, it seems possible that I have even been wrong about that. That the end of the world was mine alone and the rest of itâ across the woods at the seaside, this vacant ghost town that had once belonged to Jacob and myself and to nobody else and now just seemed to belong to no one, along that empty road that leads to a place I can only imagine is the sheer drop off of the edge of a flattened planet or a gradual blurring of reality until you follow it straight into a solid white nonexistenceâperhaps the end of the world hasn't come at all and those are all still perfectly functional places filled with perfectly functional men and perfectly functional women and perfectly functional children.
I shake that dire thought off as grief-induced paranoia and shut myself up in the mausoleum I had turned my back on. I shut out the sunlight, and I go about and tighten all of the blinds so that the thin strips of it cannot pervade. A cloud of smoke is hovering as I pass the kitchen from the slice of bread I left in the toaster whose on/off switch has been broken for some time now. I go upstairs and I pull the ammonia and bleach from beneath the bathroom sink and begin to scrub the drying blood from the rim of the bathtub, and the shower curtain where I had clutched it, and the floor where it had dripped off of me with the water when I climbed out. I let the chemicals sting my raw wounds, each of which Ms. Fasch had plied open with her disinfected needles. It sends a pinching queasiness up my arm. Until then I haven't imagined an arm could feel queasy, but it can and so it does.
I leave the sponge in the tub, plumped black with my dead cells. I go into the bedroom and sit on the edge of the mattress for a time letting the earth spin outside my window and watching the light and shade create monstrous faces on my floor because of it. A knock from downstairs shakes me from the kind of stupor I am slipped into, where I allowed several hours to pass around me as I sat there on the fluffed duvet. He picked it out after we got rid of the old one. He picked out the children's, too. I have yet to step foot in their room.
I go downstairs. The clock on the wall by the front door tells me that it is time for dinner. Almost six o'clock. So I must have fallen back asleep in the meantime. I check the peephole and undo the chain. “Sheriff, what can I do for you?” Those words seem surreal. All words seem surreal now. After what has happened, after what has happened because of
me
, what importance could any casual exchange of dialogue have on the universe?
Sheriff Barilla is a tall unshaven Italian, heavyset with muscle. He embraces the stereotype of his profession and as such he wears blacked-out aviator glasses from the moment he clocks in until he returns home for the night, and he refuses to get out of his dingy decade-old squad car without keeping his hand grasped firmly around the butt of his holstered weapon. The people in town refer to him privately as the ass with a hand on his butt.
“Mrs. Hesse, how are you doing this evening?” He gives a quick nod of his chin and takes off his wide hat as he sidesteps around me and comes in. He surveys the room with his hat held at his side. “I just wanted to come and update you on your husband. Jacob Hesse.”
“I know my husband's name, Sheriff.”
“Hm. Nevertheless.” He turns to face me with the rigid propriety of a Buckingham beefeater. “I spoke with a Sergeant from Sarasota County. They found the vehicle registered to Mr. Hesse abandoned in a retention pond, tangled in duckweed and coated with algae. There were no signs of him or the children.”
“Thank you, Sheriff.”
“My duty, ma'am.” He turns on his heels and parades back out the door. It seems to shut of its own accord behind him. I watch through the peephole as he flips his hat back onto his scalp and adjusts it properly.
Once the car is backed out of the driveway and disappeared in the evening shadows down the street, I go back upstairs to our bedroom. There is a shoebox on the top shelf of our closet. I stretch and pry it out with my wrapped hand, catch it against my stomach, and take it down to the kitchen table. The smoke of the toast has cleared through the window I left cracked open, but the pungency of burnt toast lingers. I sit for a time with my hands on the lid of the box before flipping it off. It clatters softly on the table. I see the pressed poppy flower he takes with him from the field where we meet. I see my garter from our wedding and our first sonogram. He always called it his little box of me. I reach under the packet of pornographic photographs he has taken of us over the years and pick up the unloaded gun he keeps there.
I wonder, if this is his little box of me, had he considered me the trigger? The first event in a long chain of cause and effect? Or am I simply a bullet? The pressed poppy begins to inflate with the water that has fallen onto it as I cry. I push the box aside and lay the gun on the table in front of me. Further in the box is a small carton of bullets. I have seen him load the weapon a number of times, simply for the sake of showing me how it is done in case I should ever need to use it. We sit there like that for a long time. I wait for Sheriff Barilla to return, to tell me that he has found them, that he can tell me what has happened to them.
I hear the familiar pattern of footsteps run along the upstairs hallway. It must be dinnertime. The softly carpeted hall, so used to my children running along it to rush down here to the table, is thumping loudly out of habit. The front door creaks. I want it to be Jacob, come home from work as he has every day since we'd bought this house except for the last nine.
Without moving anything but my good hand I flip open the lid of the carton and ruffle through the little steel cylinders with my fingers, counting them. There are thirty, three rows of ten. I pull one out and sit it on its flat end on the table in front of me, tangential to its lord and master which is empty, and hungry for its faith. Jacob builds this table one year, early, before the children have been conceived, to replace the gaudy folding card table we had been using before that. It still has the etching of their names from the days when they crawl beneath it while I am busy at the oven and scrawl messages to each other with pens and butter knives.
I try to think of something I have forgotten to do. I have picked up the splintered remains of his final conquest and scrubbed the bathtub clean of what should have been
mine
. The images of Nickolas and Kyra run into the kitchen just as planned, then blur with the dust and the remaining smoke that fills the space around me like a finely granulated fog, and they disappear. Nobody has come in through the door. And when I realize that it is more plausible for Preacher Johns to have come marching in unannounced, berating his head with a week's old newspaper, than my husband for whom this should have been home, then I spin the bullet slowly around on the table, inspecting its flawlessly smooth sides, and I press it into its socket.
The click, as I close the barrel and place the gun back on the table, comforts me. I put my hands on either side of it, palms flat on the surface, and we stare at each other until late, late, late into the night. I think of the flight of birds.
At first all I notice is the grunting silhouette of a beast rummaging through my dresser. I watch him for a moment and though I can't quite explain why, I feel a great wet, mucky bubble of disgust rise up in me. I want to spit and scream and beat the monstrous thing over its horned skull until it is a pulp in the corner to be swept up with the cockroach shells and the dust. I quell the urge by rolling over and pulling our down comforter over my head. It's not quite enough because I can hear the sliding of the drawer, I can hear his old bones groaning as he sits on the corner of the bed, and the rustle as he pulls his socks on over his feet one at a time. I have to be careful because I don't want him to know I'm awake. I don't want him to come to the edge of the bed, pull back the blanket, kiss me on the cheek as he wishes me a good day and then grazes his hand over my breast before placing it on my stomach as though that is where he intended for it to land. I shift my head to the side and slip it beneath my pillow, hoping I've done so with enough grace not to have alerted him. He has the awareness of a spider to my vibrations on his web strings.
Fears averted, thank Whatever. The fat and unruly black hole of his mass lifts itself from the edge of the bed and the bathroom door closes. I throw the blanket aside and sit up. If I want to be gone before he finishes getting ready for work, I probably don't have much time. I dress and go out and down the hall. I can hear Ingot, my little golden treasure, hopping around her bedroom. I press the door open slowly and look in. She's sitting at her Little Princess Vanity set, brushing her hair with a bright pink plastic-handled brush that I don't think even has real bristles, and talking into the mirror above it. It's not even a real mirror, just a wide circle of silver foil-plated cardboard. I can't remember ever being that gullible. Though for her sake, I prefer to wish she spend all her days in front of a fake vanity than to find herself in front of a real one and forced to see herself miserable and old. Better a happy unreality than, well, the alternative.
I press the door open a little wider. “Good morning, honey,” I say. I bring out my mother's smile because she deserves to be greeted with that for as long as humanly possible. She turns and good god the corners of her mouth turn up into the kind of smile you just never want to stop watching.
“Hi, Mommy!” she pipes. She puts the brush down on her table and starts rummaging through her plastic Little Princess backpack she has leaning against the leg of the vanity. She pulls out a sheet of paper and runs it to me. I pluck it out of her offering hand and then she wrangles my legs together at the thighs by wrapping her arms around them and burying her face in the seam of my scrubs.
“What's this?” I open the folded sheet of construction paper. There is a crude drawing of two little girls holding hands and skipping through a field of oversized red tulips. A frowning sun that she has left uncolored sits in the upper corner.
“Mrs. Morgan had everybody write a card to Kyra's mommy. I brought mine home so I could give it to her myself. Can you give it to her?”
I hold her close so that she doesn't see the drop in the smile I've summoned for her. I close the card and put it in my wide back pocket. “Of course, honey. Of course I will. Now finish getting ready for school, okay?”
She says she will and she goes back to her vanity where she picks her brush up again and takes a seat. I close the door and stand in the hall with my back to it. I reach for the card in my pocket but then
he
walks out of our room. He looks at me and says good morning before heading downstairs. I scratch my thigh as a diversion and ignore the card. I feel as though letting him see it will be a defeat. The truth is I don't want him to have even the simplest peek into our daughter's life. I don't need to re-read it anyway. The five seconds was all it took. “Dear Mrs. Hesse, I really miss Kyra and I hope that she is okay. I hope that you are okay, too. She is my best friend and I really really love her and you. And Nicky too. With Warmest Sympathies, Ingot Fasch, Mrs. Morgan's 1st Grade Class.” The regards are printed piecemeal, unevenly. Obviously copied from the board. But damn you Mrs. Morgan, what kind of person would think this is a good idea?
Poor woman. I've only met her a few times, usually at school functions or while dropping the children off at each other's house, and the few times I talk to her she usually comes off as something of a Hallmark bitch. But I can't imagine my husband, wicked as he is, up and leaving one day with our children. Leading them into the car with the congenial nonchalance of a shepherd's flock never to see me again. Not even my Frank would dream of doing something like that.
Once the horns of his bed-slept hair descend out of view, I continue to the last bedroom at the end of the hall. The door is open so I go in and sit on the bed. It is neatly made, which I hear is a rare thing for boys of his age. The shower is hissing from his bathroom and a serpent's back of steam slithers off the tiles and melts into the carpet. The shower shuts off and a moment later he comes out with a towel wrapped around his waist, unabashed. I can't believe something so handsome and well-built could come from such a shoddy, scab-backed wildebeest as Frank. Emery's entire body is lean, firm and well-toned. Hairless. The truth is that something this handsome and well-built might very well not have come from Frank at all, but in his macho narcissism he has never really questioned the resemblance.
He smiles and says, “What's up?”
“Nothing,” I say. I try to smile back, but lately all I give him are doleful half-smirks topped with sad and wistful eyes. “How'd you sleep? How's the new mattress?”
“It's pretty good. I've been sleeping way better than I was before.”
He goes to his closet and lets the towel drop with his back to me. I shy my eyes down to my unclothed feet out of respect. He is a good boy, smarter than he will ever give himself credit for and so he uses his sports and his weight training to try and compensate for what he thinks he doesn't have. Since he's started high school I've noticed my own friends, the teachers and other children's mothers, toss inappropriate hidden glances at him. I don't blame them for it. He doesn't belong in this town. I only wish that the place he chose to go toâ
“Good,” I say. “You were due for a new one.” A neatly ironed pair of dull gray, almost cloud-blue, slacks is slung over the chair at his desk. I can't help myself from flicking my eyes at it. For a moment I remember there are worse people in this world than my Frank. “Well, you know it'll always be here for you. For when you get back.”
“I know, Mom,” he says as he pulls his shirt on over his head. It clings to the muscles of his shoulders before wiping down his back.
I know you know. I'm saying it for myself
.
He leans down and kisses me on the cheek. “I have to get to school early. I'll see you when I get home.”
“Please don't be late.”
“I won't, Mom. Love you.” He rushes out, grabs the schoolbag by the door. I sit there for a little while, staring at those pants. Hanging in his closet I can see its companion piece amidst a rainbow of other, less foreboding shirts and jackets. Three days earlier, when Mrs. Hesse came into the hospital for her hand, this all felt like a decade away. Slipped, she said. Like anyone would believe that story after what had happened to her. Like anyone would
blame
her. Personally, I'd've killed myself twice over by now if Frank stole my children out from under me in the middle of the day. And the nerve of her to rub
this
in my face, while I am plucking the glass from her veins, no less. A bitch, no way around it, a bitch. But, perhaps nine days from now, I'll find myself stitching up some other woman with the same luck as us and I'll do the same thing to her. Spite is a grease of human machineries.
Ingot runs into the room and grabs me by the hand. “Come on, Mommy, I made us breakfast!”
“Okay, honey, I'm coming.” I stand up. Goddammit I'm getting old. My back aches just pulling myself up. “Is Daddy still here?” I ask as we approach the staircase.
“No, he already went to work.”
Good
, I think,
Find a brick wall on your way and kiss it with your car
. “Oh, too bad he won't be able to share breakfast! What did you make, honey?”
“Peanut butter jelly pancakes!” she chirps. And sure enough, they are there on the table. Pre-frozen pancakes not yet microwaved, draped in thick hunks of peanut butter and grape jelly. “But tell you what, baby, why don't I cook us up some hot fresh ones, just like you like? Some bacon too?”
She is all too ecstatic about that and I slide the frozen disks into the trash. Poor girl probably doesn't even realize what tonight actually means to us all.
After breakfast, I walk her to the corner to wait with her and the other children. There are two less than there should be and nobody seems to have quite gotten used to it yet. Off by the dunes I can just make out the Hesse's house. It's been dark lately. At the end of the block, parked just around the corner, is Sheriff Barilla. Since the kidnappings, he's had someone stationed at every school bus stop in the morning and the afternoon. He may be an ass, but the man's smart and he's got his priorities right. The children are quiet. They stand about like a system of Gaelic totems in early sunlight, casting long dismal shadows behind them in neatly spaced lines.
The bus pulls up just as city hall tolls eight. Ingot climbs the steps last, holding onto my hand until everyone else is already disappeared into its darkened interior. She says goodbye and I lean down to give her a kiss. After the bus pulls away, I give a quick wave to Sheriff Barilla. He returns a somber nod and then he drives away. I check my watch and hurry back home. Once I'm there I lock the front door and check my watch again. I have forty minutes to get ready. I pull my scrubs off over my head and shimmy out of the loose blue linen pants; leave them in a pile of shriveled skin by the front door. I prepare a pitcher of mimosa and take a sip right out of it, and then I set it on the coffee table along with two crystal flutes. I recline like a goddess with one arm over my forehead and the other draped off the sofa and on the floor, and my spirit defuses upon contact with the coolness of the fabric and the shade.
I once made love to a man in the shade of a maple tree at the edge of a forest on the frontier of a cool summer. The heat of a sun had seemed impossible. If our warmth could come from the moon, that was the warmth it would have been. And this is how that felt.
The tap comes not fifteen minutes later. In the rare peace I have almost fallen asleep, but it shakes me back to consciousness. I keep my eyes closed but an eager grin rises on my face. I hear the door open and whisper shut and I feel the vibrations of soft, heavy footsteps come across the floor until they are standing at the base of the sofa. I imagine him staring down at me with faceless eyes.
I open my eyes. He is a blank silhouette masked by the dim lighting and the windows at his back. The specter of Dionysus come to claim me. As though simply opening my eyes has manifested my fantasy into a physical reality before me. I close my eyes again and arch my back. Moments later I hear the hushing of clothes being shed, and then my skin begins lifting away from my bones inch by inch as he glides his lips up my body. I feel as though I am being reassembled tissue by tissue, plucked away and then let to fall back in place though transformed, different, better. I feel the weight of a powerful mass compress me into the cushions. I smell the musk of apples and sweat and I feel the wetness of rivers flowing around me. I become a river in spate myself under its persuasion, eddying and flowing outwards until I am nothing left but an empty withered skin, panting and trying to regain some physical form.
He sits up next to me and pours a smooth tide of mimosa into one of the flutes. He leans back, naked, prideful, replete, and takes a slow sip. I curl up, myself naked, at his side, with my knees up to my chest and my head tucked into the crook of his shoulder and neck. He puts an arm around me and holds me there. The rare times Frank does such a thing, he never holds me in place. He simply lets his arm lay upon me indiscriminately.
The sadness comes over me like the early sunset of a winter night. I regain a physical form and I resent myself for it. “Ohâ” I coo to him, exhaling the final remnants of the pleasure, of the easiness of it. “I can't keep doing this, Benjamin.”
He stares at the ripples of his drink and then takes a longer sip. He sighs. The strength, the solidness of his arm suddenly becomes rigidity without him moving it. “Is this because of Emery?”
He feels the shift of my head on his skin indicating that yes, it is because of Emery. “He's leaving, Benjamin.”
“I know that, Margot, I just don't understand what that has to do with me.”
I think for a long time about how I should say it. “It
has
nothing to do with you. That's the point, I think.” I want to tell him, don't leave. I want to tell him, his presence is the only thing keeping me from
total
misery. I want to tell him that I love him and wish things were different. But if I say those things, he will never leave. And, in the end, he has to. He is my circle of silver-foiled cardboard, he is my bristle-less brush, and he sits upon this genuine mahogany countertop assembled from a family tree.
“Margot, I really don't thinkâ”
I shake my head to cut him off. I know what he is going to say and there's no point in him saying it. Before he moves I can feel his body shrinking away, his eyes shifting toward his pile of clothes he has left on the floor. Benjamin, the warmth of him, the softness of him, the hardness of him, had been a way station. I have vacationed for too long. When Emery tells me the decision he has made, it immediately occurs to me that the failing of our family is as much my own fault as it is Frank's.
He
has opened a great rift, but in
my
blaming him for the end of the world, I have failed to see that the end of the world has not yet come. Now, when I step outside, it is all I can see, and I wonder, in the long meantime between then and now, have I done anything to avert it?