The Invaders (15 page)

He pointed to the sky as a small bird flitted overhead.

“That's a common sparrow,” I said.

“That's cool,” he said. “I thought it was something better.”

I was looking at the base of the reeds, trying to find my binoculars discreetly.

“What are you looking for? Nests?”

“Dog shit, actually. There's an ordinance about it and no one cares.”

“You can't police the world, Cheryl.” He looked at me and smiled, trying to make a joke.

“I know. I know. I'm working on it.”

We came upon an opening in the reeds and the cattails and I exhaled for the first time since we started on the trail. The sun was glorious and the tide was high; the inlet into the marsh was thick with birds—tufted ducks, the magnificent black-bellied plover, egrets, herons—they just went on with it all as if nothing had happened here. They ducked in and out of the water looking for food as the crabs slowly inched through the mud and the small, black mussels shot thin streams of water into the air in concert.

We kept on, falling back into the maze of reeds after the temporary
breadth of space. We walked toward a bend in the reeds, everything ahead of us obscured.

A man came ripping through on a bicycle and I jumped into Teddy and yelped.

“Jesus Christ, Cheryl!” Teddy yelled.

I pulled him out of the reeds.

“I'm sorry. I'm sorry,” the man said.

“Watch where the hell you're going,” I said. He was harmless, older, but it didn't matter.

“I didn't see anyone up ahead.”

“It's a blind curve, so how could you?” I asked.

He jumped back on his bike and rode away, calling out sorry again but not wanting to get involved in our situation.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“My shoes are a little wet, that's all.”

“Maybe we should head back.”

“It was a dude on a bike, Cheryl.”

“I know, I know,” I said.

“We have to get it together. Get healthy.”

He pointed to my hand. I was down to a few waterproof Band-Aids and a twice-daily application of Neosporin.

“Maybe we should start juicing,” I said.

“That's not going to help us at all,” he said. “We can't just be shut-ins. We're going to end up on an episode of fucking
Hoarders
or whatever.”

“I see you more as a guest on
Intervention
,” I said.

“That's not even okay to say,” Teddy said.

I put my arm around him and told him I was joking. “You're doing a great job,” I said.

“I'm saying, we shit the bed, you know?”

“I don't even know what that means,” I said.

“You're scared of a guy on a bicycle wearing tights,” he said. “In tights.”

“It could be worse.”

•  •  •

A week of rain came and I only got out of bed to give Teddy his pills and take him to his physical therapy appointments near the hospital. It was a tropical depression, nothing major. Together, Teddy and I would try to do the exercises they said he would respond to. He wasn't seeing results, though, and I saw him giving up hope. I was, too. Since the accident Jeffrey had tried to steer clear of me, no matter what attempts I made. I wasn't going for walks anymore, just sitting on the patio chair watching the water and the sun rise when the rain would pause from the safety of the yard.

“Is there any food?” Teddy yelled from the sofa. I opened the fridge and it was filled wall to wall with food. I asked him what he wanted and he only grumbled, saying he wasn't sure.

“Work with me,” I said. “What are you in the mood for?”

“I don't know, really. Surprise me,” he said. I wanted to drop him off in front of a Wendy's.

I had been taking care of him and I had come to loathe any talk of food.
What
'
s for dinner?
was the worst. There wasn't a single day when I cared about what was for dinner, but for Teddy and Jeffrey it seemed like that was all they could think about. With Teddy here, suddenly there had to be a routine. He was always hungry. I couldn't toss a bowl of cereal toward Teddy, either, it had to be a meal. Jeffrey needed at least one vegetable. Teddy asked me if I wanted some more cookbooks to vary things up. Things were becoming unbearable. Teddy and I ordered pizza and watched the men build the fence outside. They didn't stop for the rain. Watching them work became an obsession of mine. It almost looked like they were trying to keep the water out, like it would
never reach us here. I worried about the broken window at my mother's house, of water pouring into the broken window and filling the house with mold.

I decided to cut up the club directory and only keep fortune-cookie-size slips of printed phone numbers in a drawer by my bedside. I blocked my number and started my calls. A woman picked up and sounded impatient. I hung up quickly, apologizing for calling the wrong number. The second was a young boy. I hesitated and then just hung up on him without a word.

On the third call, a man picked up and I didn't recognize his voice. It could have been anyone. I made my voice sound youthful and said “Hello” like it wasn't even a question.

He sounded impatient on the phone and for a moment I considered hanging up.

“How are you feeling?” I tried to sound familiar, to make him unsure.

“Fine. Who is this?”

“Whoever you want me to be,” I said, and waited for the silence.

“Look, I'm kind of in a rush,” he said. Then, “Can you call back?”

I stared down at the slip with the number and said, “I'm not sure.”

“Please.”

I thought about it. “Who do you want me to be?” I asked.

“I'm not sure yet.”

I hung up the phone and crumpled the paper and threw it in the garbage. I stuck my hand in the drawer and pulled out another fortune and dialed.

“Hello?”

“Hi,” I said.

“Hello.”

The voice sounded middle-aged. It didn't have the crackle of age or the squeak of youth. I asked him how he was doing and he said he was just fine. He sounded like he was waiting for me to start selling
him something. His polite silence worried me. The aggressive ones were usually more interested in talking to me. Something about his voice seemed familiar, but I decided to ignore that. I decided to head him off.

“I'm not trying to sell you anything,” I said. And then, after a silence, I asked him what was wrong.

“Well, right now, I'm not sure who I'm talking to and you won't tell me who you are or why you're calling,” he said.

“You didn't ask who this was,” I said.

I had to be careful here because he could think I was teasing him and some men didn't like to be teased.

“Who is this?” he asked.

“Whoever you want me to be.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes,” I whispered.

He cleared his throat and then it sounded like he was moving to sit down, get comfortable. “There are so many options,” he said.

“Try me,” I said.

He let out a sigh and said, “I just don't know.”

I heard Teddy making his way to the bathroom and thought about hanging up. This man wasn't progressing fast enough. He was probably Kirk from down the street, a bad golfer and a mediocre husband.

“Why don't you just say a name?”

I knew Teddy wouldn't come in or even knock on my door when it was closed. I don't think he liked coming into the bedroom where his father and I slept, even when we weren't at home.

“How about Marilyn?” I played my Marilyn for him and he seemed to like it.

“Sing me happy birthday.” He laughed.

“Is it your birthday?”

“Well, no,” he said, so I told him I couldn't.

“You're not very nice to me,” he said.

“I could be,” I said.

“What do I have to do to get that?” he said, getting into things now.

“I haven't decided yet.”

I looked out the window. The men were hard at work on the fence outside; they were only two houses away.

“Do you like yourself?” I asked, really curious.

It took him off guard. I think he was waiting for me to ask him something more pleasant, sexual.

“I like myself all right.”

“Good,” I whispered. “I thought you might be bad.”

He gave a high-octave laugh and then said, “Is this a test? A trick to get me to say something bad so you can tell my wife?”

“I don't even know who your wife is,” I said. I wasn't lying.

“What are you wearing?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said, looking down at my plaid nightgown.

He said, “Wow,” and nearly choked on the word. “So you think you're naughty?” he asked.

I nearly giggled. I was getting into it again. Then I heard “Daddy!” yelled in the background.

“I have to go,” he said. And then he was gone.

I closed the drawer full of scraps and threw away this man's phone number. I had forgotten how to be sexual and I cringed thinking that these people might be embarrassed for me. What was I even doing?

I went into Jeffrey's office and stared at his computer. My skin began to tingle as I walked over, sat down, and turned it on. I opened his web browser and looked at the history. It was blank. He'd erased it, which made me realize that he knew I was checking. I knew there would be something somewhere he was directing all his attention to. And then, after clicking around, I found it in his download folder: Luz_hotfucking.mov.

I trembled as I opened the folder. A video popped up and it was pixelated and grainy. A young woman waited on a dirty mattress and
spread her legs wide. She stared at the man holding the camera and tried to smile. She was young, brown-haired and light-skinned. She looked oddly familiar. It was impossible that I'd seen her before, wasn't it? The cameraman bent her over and started to have sex with her. She turned around and looked like she was crying. Then I knew why she looked familiar. She looked like the young girl crying for her father, the man on the ground with his fishing poles. I fumbled at the keyboard, trying to shut the video off. I didn't know how, so I just slammed the screen down shut. The sound was muffled but still on and I could hear her moans and screams.

And then a man's voice said, “Say you want it.”

I sat there for a moment. He kept saying, “Say you want it.” Then a small voice with a thick accent said, “I want it,” over and over again.

I opened the laptop and he was shoving his penis into her mouth. I paused the video and looked at her face. Tears were frozen in a stream down her swollen cheeks. This is what Jeffrey wanted? He was trying to take so many things from her.

I minimized the window and opened another window. I stared at my mother's ramshackle house. We didn't have the internet back then. The sex happened skin on skin. There were no affairs with computer screens or disinterest because someone was waiting to video chat with wide-open legs. I had seen it all and ignored it for the good of us. It was part of the deal and it's what made him the marrying kind, straying without hurting anyone. No one told me about the things that happened to all of us.

I stared at my mother's dark house. How could I know so much and know nothing?

I WAS PRETTY SURE
that Cheryl was chowing down on my pills. Some days she was nearly catatonic and it creeped me out. I couldn't sleep and I found her sitting outside wrapped in a blanket staring at the dark skyline. I wasn't sure if it was because she missed my dad or what. He was going away more and more now and I didn't really think he had had a sudden uptick in business trips. I think he just needed to get away from both of us. My dad has never been good at taking care of people. It just wasn't his thing. He couldn't take care of my mom and he couldn't take care of himself. If Cheryl wasn't careful he'd leave her, too. I almost felt bad for her because she didn't see the patterns like I did. She had no context; she didn't know that this is how it started with him. Emergency trips, longer trips, extended trips. I need to bring my golf clubs along because that's where we have meetings. When they first got together, he used to take her along because that's what wives like her are for—showing off and saying I win. She might not be a great conversationalist, but she was really nice to look at. Don't you feel bad
about your wife with the wide hips? It was all mind-control shit. It was how he got the top-shelf accounts. No one wanted a middle-aged loser handling their account; they wanted someone who could attract a new young wife and knew the value in that kind of play. Strategic life plays. She looked like she had aged since the accident.

“Have you slept at all?” I asked as I stepped outside. She turned around, startled, and said, “A little.”

I looked up. Every star in the sky was lit up like white pinpricks. It was amazing.

“It's beautiful.”

“Isn't it?” she asked, shaking her head. “How could you ever leave a place like this?”

I sat down beside her and we watched the sky turn gray and the water light up. I was never going to be able to sail again.
Screw this, Teddy. No dark thoughts; we went over this.
I wanted to know when my father would be back. Cheryl didn't seem to have any answers.

“Teddy?” she asked after a moment.

“Yeah,” I answered.

“Why hasn't anyone come to visit you?”

I thought at least Pauline would come, but no, it was just me and Cheryl now. The pariahs of Little Neck Cove. I wasn't sure what she had done to deserve it, but me? Me, it was well deserved.

“I don't know.”

The pain was acting up in my arm again. So now finally I had all the pills I ever wanted, and I didn't even really want them anymore. The irony wasn't lost on me. I wanted to be awake and feeling things again. Flipping your car will do that, I guess. Isn't that what people say: I had a terrible accident, almost died, and now I wanted to live?