The Open Curtain (20 page)

“I’ve failed you,” he said through the door.

No, she said. Well yes, but don’t think of it like that, life’s not over yet, and hadn’t they had good times too? Christmas, for instance, he had been charming then, and times since then too? No, not a failure, he shouldn’t think of it that way, but yes they could do better, yes they had some things to work out, but he should stop thinking
I
, it was not
I
but
we,
and those things could be worked out, she was sure, she wasn’t innocent either though certainly not as guilty as he was. This was all new to her, she was still figuring out how to make a relationship work. They could work together, but
that was it, they had to work together, they had to work things out,
you have to tell me what you think and know, and let’s figure it out, who was involved, who was responsible, you can’t have secrets from me, tell me what you know Rudd, tell me what you
—

“I can’t hold on anymore,” he said. “You don’t know,” he said. “If you knew, I promise you.”

“What?” she said.

“I want to die.”

“To die? Why?”

But he didn’t answer.

“What are you talking about? It’s not better for me or for you either, and who else
is
there? I don’t want that, that’s the last thing I want. How could you possibly get that out of what I’ve been saying?”

She heard him wandering about the room, sobbing.

“You’re an idiot,” she said. “A fucking idiot.” She stood up, rushed from the door and into the front room, dialed 911. An ambulance was on its way, she was told. She dropped the telephone, running back through the house and pounding on the door. “Rudd,” she called. “Rudd?” She tried the door and he was no longer in front of it or holding the knob but the goddam padlock was on, she had put it on herself. She moved through the other rooms, looking for something to open the door, the floor fluid and threatening to come up against her as it had when she had been first told of her family’s death. She made it down the hall and into the utility room—washer and dryer, the photos and articles on the murder, tool chest in the corner. She opened it, grabbed a Phillips screwdriver, rushed back to Rudd’s door. Four screws on the hasp the lock was attached to, she started on the first, the screw threatening to strip at first and then groaning and coming out slowly and cleanly, falling to the carpet.

“Rudd, don’t,” she said.

Then the next one, turning lazily: maddening to have to wrap all her energy into the turning of one tiny screw. Falling out and then the next started, the sound of Rudd inside the room burbling and dropping heavily to the floor, Lyndi’s mouth making noises that she could not control, shrieking, it wouldn’t come, wouldn’t quite start, and she pushed her whole body against the handle of the screwdriver, and the screw finally groaned loose and twisted free. Then the last screw coming somehow smoothly and quickly and she turned the doorknob and pushed her way in—

He was lying on the floor, a Swiss Army knife in his hand, all four of its blades open. His throat was open and gurgling and blood bubbled up from
it, the collar of his T-shirt bloody, blood now leaking down the sides of his neck as well. She put her mouth to his mouth and blew, hearing the air hiss out of the slit in his throat as he coughed blood into her mouth. She covered the slit with one hand, felt the air go in and stay in, blood welling between her fingers. He coughed again, and she tasted blood in his mouth, but he was still breathing, still breathing, and then paramedics pushed her aside, carried him away.

She had to wait. She kept sliding her chair forward until it was almost touching the desk and she could lean forward, examine the series of paperweights he seemed to have arranged as a barrier of some kind between where she was sitting and where he would be soon. When he came in, he shook her hand; she bumped a knee on the desk trying to stand. He sat down, busied himself with Rudd’s file.

“He’s stable,” he said.

She nodded.

“His voice might change, depending on how the windpipe heals. The skin on his neck, though, at least some of it, has been traumatized too severely to do much with. It might bleed a little from time to time, leak a bit. We’ve done what we can, will eventually have to graft.” He looked at her closely. “He’s done this before, hasn’t he? Tried to kill himself?”

She shook her head. “No,” she said. “Someone tried to kill him.”

“Oh,” he said. “Perhaps I’ll post a suicide watch.”

“I’ll stay with him,” she said.

“His arms, we’ll keep him strapped down for a few days,” he said. “Just to be safe.”

“All right.”

He stood and left the room and never came back. Eventually a nurse came and got her, ushered her to a post-op room. Rudd was lying in a bed, unconscious, arms strapped down.

“Don’t undo those,” said the nurse, pointing to the straps. “They’re for his own protection.”

She pulled the chair closer, sat beside the bed, resting her hand on his arm.

“We’re back where we started,” she said brightly. “Ready to try again?”

In and out of consciousness. Awake, asleep, awake.
Bring me my robe,
she thought she heard someone say. A thin silver thread that resolved itself, slowly, into a bed rail.

He was awake, trying to move his hands, the bed rail he was strapped to groaning. She told him it was all right, and he looked over as if noticing her for the first time. His neck was bandaged, the pad soaked sufficiently with blood that she could make out the stitched flesh beneath.

“No,” she said. “Don’t try to speak.”

He kept touching his index finger to his thumb again and again, until finally she realized he wanted to write something. She went to the nurse’s station and got a pen, a pad of post-it notes as well. She loosened the restraint a little, but still had to hold the pad for him, nosing it along so he could reach both sides and finish his words.

I’m sorry,
he wrote.

“Don’t do it again,” she said. “Promise me.”

He nodded.
I love you,
he wrote.

“I guess I feel strongly about you too,” she said. “I sometimes wonder why. God only knows.”

Scratch my face.

“Where on your face?”

Whole.

She put her hand on his face, moving it, asking him
Here? Here?
until he nodded slightly. She scratched until he burbled, then went back to the pad.

Marry me,
he wrote.

“Are you serious?” she asked.

Say yes,
he said.

“You’re an idiot,” she said. “A complete idiot.”

Then thought,
I would have someone for good then. I’ve made so many mistakes, why not risk one more? It’s about time things started working out for me.
Yet he was unstable.
But aren’t I good enough to save him?

Please,
he had written. The “s” and the “e” written small beneath the other letters because he could not reach the far side of the pad:

Please

“You’re an idiot,” she said again. And then suddenly was so afraid of what it might be like to be completely alone again, so afraid of whatever else she might bring upon herself if she said no, that she took the pad and wrote, carefully,

Yes

N
o,” said her aunt on the telephone. “I won’t have it, you’re too young, absolutely not.” Rudd’s mother had said the same thing—
unacceptable
—which made Lyndi, who had been wavering herself, feel now that she had something to prove.

Her bishop was admittedly cautious, but not without optimism. “Well,” he said, “you’re young, true, but people have married young before and still made their marriages last. How old are you?”

“Nineteen,” she said.

He looked a little shocked. “That’s young. And how old is he?”

“Nearly nineteen.”

The Bishop put his elbows on his desk, leaned forward. “That’s even younger,” he said. “Usually boys that age are going on missions.”

“He’s been through a lot,” she said, “being almost killed and all. He’s still working through it. I don’t think a mission is the best choice for him.”

“Have you prayed about it?”

“Yes,” lied Lyndi.

“And he’s prayed about it?”

“Yes,” she lied. “We both feel it’s the right thing.”

“Good,” he said. “And of course you plan to do it right.”

“Right?”

“Temple marriage, I mean.”

“Oh,” she said. “Of course.”

He came back from the hospital, his neck still wrapped in gauze. Every day, she helped him change it. She peeled away the dressings, smeared the surface beneath with a cream they had given her. The grafted skin was angrier than the rest of his neck, a blotched swath across his throat.

“How do you feel?” she asked.

“Good,” he said, his voice odd and sunken from all his neck had been through, his intonation having acquired a certain flatness.

“Do you love me?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said, same flat voice, eyes dull.

Wrapping his neck back up, she made him a bowl of runny oatmeal. He dribbled it into his mouth slowly, as if in shock.

“I was thinking a simple reception,” she said. “Something in the backyard, if anything at all.”

He nodded. “I don’t know anyone,” he said.

“That’s true,” she said. “We’ve already got a house full of things. Maybe nothing at all, then. We won’t tell anyone. It’ll be like eloping.”

He said nothing. He continued to eat, spoon lifting slowly to his lips, oatmeal sliding in.

He was normal now, she thought, subdued. Having his throat slit a second time had made him tractable. He had, at least temporarily, become a good listener, would sit still as she talked, answer only if he was asked a direct question or given a cue. She had the upper hand for once, she thought, knowing it was a mistake to think of relationships in such terms but thinking in them anyway.

It was the end of summer and she had started back at college again, a light load. He was too ill for school, he told her, still having difficulties with his neck, which, despite the graft, oozed when he exerted himself. “Kiss me,” she would say, and he would, blandly, his neck glistening.

The day before the wedding, he began to get anxious.

“Why the temple?” he said, as they watched TV. “My throat hurts.” Indeed, his throat where the skin was grafted was a deep red. “Maybe we should think about this a little more. Maybe we should just get married civilly.”

“
I
don’t have any doubts,” she said. “But if
you
do, fine, we can wait.”

“No,” he said. “I’m just trying to talk myself into it.”

“I don’t have to talk myself into it.”

“Please don’t be like that,” he said. “All I’m asking is if you’re sure.”

“Sure as I can be,” she said.

“Have you prayed?” he asked.

“Not exactly,” she said. “But I have a good feeling.”

“A good feeling? Why haven’t you prayed?”

“Why haven’t you?”

“It doesn’t work for me,” he said. “Not any more. God doesn’t answer my prayers.”

“Maybe he answers them in ways you don’t perceive. Or maybe the answers are
no
.”

“No,” he said. “God has drawn a curtain between myself and heaven and there is no parting it. When I was growing up I sometimes felt him. Now, never.”

“What did you do?”

“Do?” he said, suspiciously. “Who said I did anything?”

She went into the utility room, took a load of clothing out of the dryer, put it into a basket. It was still a little damp. She moved the clothing from the washer into the dryer. She carried the basket back into the living room and began folding it while he flipped through channels.

“You don’t believe in the Gospel?” she asked him.

“It’s not as simple as that.”

She slid off the couch and sat in front of it, to be closer to the basket.

“You had a good feeling,” he said, and laughed. “Maybe if you actually prayed, God would have plenty to say about me.”

“He’d tell me to go ahead,” she said quickly.

“Perhaps he’d tell you to stay the hell away from me,” he said. “Or perhaps he wouldn’t bother to part the curtain and take enough of a look at me to tell you anything at all.”

He went to his room. When he came back from the hospital he had screwed the latch back into place, attaching another latch on the inside as well, so he could lock the door either from inside or out. She watched TV a while longer, then piled the clothes she had folded into the basket. Not knowing if the door was locked, not caring to find out, she left his clothes in two neat stacks outside his door. She went into the kitchen, leaving the dish towels on the counter, carrying the rest of the basket up to her parents’ bedroom.

Stacking the clothes on her father’s dresser, she put the basket outside the door.

She lay on the bed, hands above her head. It felt good to stretch. She was getting married tomorrow: surely there was something she should do. It didn’t feel like she was getting married.

She got off the bed and went to the closet, took her mother’s wedding dress out. She spread it on the bed, looked it over. It was simply cut,
high-necked, sleeves down to the wrist and ankles, off-white, the fabric a little yellowed.