The Suicide Motor Club (3 page)

CARLA HARRIS WALKED INTO THE HOSPITAL HOLDING HERSELF LIKE A WOMAN
who had done a great good deed. She had driven nearly twenty-four hours, not counting half a night of barely strung-together naps in the parking lot of a truck stop diner, her car close enough to the building to be visible under the lights, but not so close that thick-faced men in work shirts would leer at her on their way to eat chili dogs. Her hands still smelled ferrous from clutching the tire iron.

“Mr. Lamb is in very grave condition,” the woman with the thick horn-rimmed glasses and cheap lipstick said from behind her desk. “Are you family?”

Carla had been prepared for this.

“Yes.”

“What is your relationship to the patient?”

“Sister.”

“Name?”

“Emma Lamb.”

Robert had mentioned a spinster sister in Philly or Pittsburgh, Carla wasn't sure if it was Emma or Ellie, but this bookworm girl with the big forehead wouldn't challenge her unless the actual sister was here, and the odds weren't good on that. Robert said they weren't close. Robert
wasn't close with a lot of his kin, but she understood that because it was the same for her. Not that she had much against her own relations except that they were people, and she never could stand people for too long. That was the problem with family—they just kept being family.

Carla stared at the egghead receptionist, half hoping she'd try to give her guff, but she passed Carla a clipboard and asked her to sign in. The pen didn't write well.

Carla was glad she was going to get a chance to say good-bye to Robert; she didn't feel good about the way they'd left things.

—

“YOU'RE GOING TO HELL,” SHE HAD SAID, AND SHE MEANT IT, EVEN THOUGH SHE
wasn't sure she believed in hell.

He was calling her from some phone booth in Covington, where he always called her from. It had occurred to her that a phone booth would be a good instrument in which to cook a man, and there simply had to be cannibals in hell. She imagined them lined up like Zulus in that British movie, an army of them stamping out a cannibal dance in the fire, waiting for Robert Lamb to plump up in his glass-walled rectangular pot, waiting for the windows to crack from the heat and for his juice to run clear like a roast chicken's juice so they would know he was done and come for him. She thought all of these things in the silence after she spoke.

“Are you still there? Did you check out on me? That's your favorite move, isn't it? Checking out?”

She had caught her own reflection in the living room mirror, standing the way she always stood when she spoke on the phone, one foot crossed over the other, her free hand fingering the coils of the phone cord the way she might have fingered a rosary if she were Catholic like Robert's prize hen. She knew she was thinking mean thoughts, but she didn't care. She had a
right
. And meanness was her thing. It
turned on a certain kind of man. She knew very well what she was to Robert—the sharp-tongued bartender at the watering hole across from his law office; the cute blonde with a vocabulary just big enough to hide her ignorance. She felt bad for the people who loved her no matter what she said to them; some people are just so pretty you pretend until you can't anymore, and she was one of those people. She would learn to be nicer when she got ugly. But she would probably die before she did that.

No matter what inchworm did to her figure.

“I . . . Yes. Yes, I checked out on you. I'm sorry.”

“Sorry,” she had said, spitting the word back at him so he could hear how dead it was.

“I am sorry, Carla. More than I can tell you.”

“Maybe you are.”

She had paused, savoring the words she was about to use.

“Or maybe you'll just say anything now to protect
her
. The fucking . . .
wife
.”

“Yes,” he said. But the truth was worse than that. He wanted to shield Judith from this; of course, he
did
love her. Carla could detect love the way the deaf can feel music. But the truth was that the thing he dreaded most about Judith finding out wasn't her pain. It was his inconvenience. What a sunless, lightless fucking drag the whole weeping world would become when it got out that golden boy had put his horse in the wrong stable. A few wrong stables, if the truth were told, but this one had caught fire.

At the time she made the phone call, it had pleased her to think that if she couldn't be a wife to Robert, at least she could drive one away.

Robert had asked for this. It had been
his
drunken intimations that he might not be married for much longer that had gotten Carla to invite him up for “an after-drink drink.”
His
suggestions that his wife was unfaithful had coaxed her panties off. At least, that was the
way she let it seem to him. Truthfully, once she set her eye on something she had to have it—she would have screwed the handsome, serious-looking lawyer if he'd been married to a saint.

What finally ended the affair was Robert's refusal, even drunk, to come inside her. She had already admitted to not being on the pill, that she wanted a baby, even out of wedlock. When that seemed to scare him, she had changed her story. She told him she
was
on the pill, a new kind that you didn't have to wait to kick in. To his credit, he had been too smart to buy that one. She was trying to trap him, so he
checked out
.

She accepted this at first, she really did.

If she followed him in her car once or twice, it was his own fault. He had gotten her good and hooked, he knew exactly what he did to women. If it took her a few weeks to let go, that was to be expected.

Then it happened.

She saw him pick up the boy at kindergarten.

His boy, a wild-haired little thing with the most piercing eyes she had ever seen. She had screamed in her car, pounding the steering wheel while the oblivious philanderer drove his son home.

He had never once mentioned having a son.

She thought about telling her other regular lover, a bookie with a red devil tattoo on his ass, about her affair with Robert, knowing the hothead would beat the hell out of him. Just drive to the law firm and beat the ever-loving shit out of him in his own office, his tie flying up, his coworkers running and leaving him to gasp like a fish in his own blood. But then Rob would
really
never see her again, the bookie would go to jail, and she'd have to patch things up with the fry cook.

Instead, she put a note under Robert's windshield.

CALL ME TOMORROW AT THREE.
IF YOU KNOW WHAT'S GOOD FOR YOU.

The clock in her kitchen read ten after three when she said, “I'm going to flip a coin, Bob.”

“A coin.”

“That's right. A quarter. Your marriage rests on a quarter, how do you like that, you cheap bastard? If it comes up heads, it means I tell her. But when, right? So I flip it again. Heads, I tell her now. Tails, I tell her later. Maybe much later, you won't know.”

“And if the first one's tails?”

“Let's just say you won't have anything to worry about. Not in this world, anyway.”

“Don't say something like that. You're not going to do anything of the kind.”

She had let him stew in that for a moment, and it was a good moment.

“What if I was? Would you want that?”

She had softened her voice a note.

She would no more shoot herself than the man in the moon, but she would make him say she mattered to him. By God, she would.

“Carla . . .”

“Yes,
Bob
. I know my name,
Bob
. You're just spinning your wheels because you haven't got the sack to tell me you wish I'd dry up and blow away.”

“No, I . . . don't want that.”

“Okay, so you'd rather I told her.”

She remembered that she had heard a truck go by just then, in Covington or wherever he was, and she had the idea it was a garbage truck. People were full of garbage, and telephones were just another way for them to dump it on each other.

“Yes,” he said at last, forcing the syllable out. “If the alternative is you hurting yourself, yes.”

She didn't respond for a moment.

She let him hear ice in her glass; women who drink in the afternoon are wild horses, they could trample you.

“Well,” she said. “That's something. The thing is, Bob, I don't believe you.”

She twirled the cord, thrilling to the power it held, what she could do through it.

“Carla, listen,” he said.

“No, Bob, you listen.”

That was when she flipped a coin on the table so he could hear its potent
chink
and wobble. She had looked at herself in the mirror as she did it. She looked good holding a phone, threatening a man. She could have been on
All My Children
.

“Well, that's interesting,” she had said.

“What? What was it?”

“Heads or tails, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

Silence.

“That's for you to find out.”

She had hung up.

That had been a month ago.

Now her lover was all banged to hell and the car he loved so much was junk. The wife was in a coma or something, the paper had said so. Now Carla was here, ready to stand tall and healthy over Robert's bed and let him see what he missed. Ready, if he was going to die, and it sounded like he might, to send him out of the world thinking about her.

She walked into his room.

God, he looked worse than she had imagined.

His
arm
was gone; the paper didn't say that.

“Oh, Robert,” she said.

So many bandages, like a mummy.

It was almost funny.

His eye was a closed slit in a patch of yellow skin.

He was out.

“Robert,” she said, moving toward his bed.

God, the tubes, the IV bag, this was like a movie.

She made her face look sympathetic and concerned. This was where he would open his eye and see her. She put her hand on her belly, gently, significantly, so he would know about inchworm in a glance, never mind that it was almost certainly not his. Robert always pulled out. She and the bookie had both been too drunk to know if he had pulled out, which meant he probably hadn't.

“Robert, look at you,” she said a little louder, letting her voice hitch.

This was his cue to look at her.

Robert wasn't opening his eye.

He didn't move at all.

But something moved to her right.

A woman had been sitting in the chair, blocked from her view by the open door. Could it be the wife? She had imagined her prettier, though, to be fair, she might look okay if not for the swelling and the wicked paint job the bruises had done on her.

The woman stood.

Was she trembling?

Carla felt her eyebrow rise, the way it always rose in confrontations. She didn't like the eyebrow. It made her look smug and, even if she felt that way, smug wasn't a good way to look. She tried to put it down, but it wouldn't go.

The woman's eyes were blue like the sky in a fairy tale.

The whites white as summer clouds.

Eyes like that boy's.

“You must be Judith,” she said, brightening her voice a little too much when she said her rival's name.

The woman looked her in the eye, then dropped her gaze to where Carla's hand lay on her belly. She looked at Carla's eyes again.

Carla got her eyebrow down.

The woman was standing with the help of a cane.

Carla got the idea that the woman wanted to beat her to death with that cane. As if reading her mind, the woman carefully set the cane on the chair.

Carla knew she should talk now.

“I just want you to know that I'm so . . .”

The fist loomed up overhand, fast, so fast.

Carla heard her own nose break.

Sat down hard.

“DO YOU HAVE VIOLENT EPISODES OFTEN?”

“I wouldn't say often.”

The man wrote on his tablet. His legs were crossed at the knee, the toe of an expensive shoe pointing up. Overhead lights reflected in his eyeglasses.

“And you said she isn't pressing charges.”

“Not if I pay for her nose job. And see you once a week.”

He smiled a practiced smile.

“Do you think she felt remorse?”

“I think she didn't want to look like a whore at the trial.”

“You mentioned she was at the funeral.”

“That's right.”

“Tell me how you feel about that.”

“I don't feel anything.”

A silver angelfish with black vertical stripes cruised by in the aquarium to her right. A very bright red hermit crab ducked into the shell it had been carrying when the fish passed.

The doctor watched Judith for a moment, but she didn't elaborate.

“Do you prefer to talk about . . . Glendon?”

He had looked at his papers to check the name.

She watched him do it, then blinked hard and looked at the ceiling.

“No.”

“I think it would be good for you. These other things we're talking about are peripheral.”

“Yep.”

“I'm assuming there haven't been any new developments.”

“I said I didn't want to talk about it.”

“That's right, you did.”

“But no. No developments.”

The fish cruised by again, rolling its big eye around. Its eye was orange like a tiny full moon rising just past sunset. She remembered Robert's eye swiveling in the triangle cut in the bandages.

She didn't speak.

“Okay. We don't have to discuss Glendon if you're not ready. What do you want to talk about?” the doctor said.

“Honestly, nothing.”

The toe of the expensive shoe bobbed up and down.

“I heard that was quite a right hook you gave her.”

“Right cross.”

“Are you a boxing enthusiast?”

“My father was a middleweight.”

“Professional?”

“Briefly.”

“What happened?”

“He figured out he wasn't ever going to get a title shot. At his best, he was the guy people beat up to get a shot at a title shot.”

“That must have been disappointing.”

“Do you think so?”

The doctor wrote in his notepad.

“Good. I like your sarcasm. I like it when you show a little life.”

“You don't sound like you like it.”

“You mustn't read too much into tone. You were talking about your father's frustrations with his boxing career.”

“Yeah. Anyway, there was steady money at the factory.”

“But he taught you. To box.”

“He wanted a boy. First he got me. Then he got Patsy. Patsy seemed like time to quit, I guess. He stuffed an army duffel full of old shirts and sawdust and hung it from a tree in the yard. He used to pay me a quarter for every half an hour I'd hit it, but only a dime if he caught me punching sloppy. He said girls not knowing how to fight was why they got taken advantage of so much. Mom hated it, said he was giving me boy's hands. I already had boy's hands. He was looking forward to . . . yeah.”

She stopped herself.

The doctor got up and poured her a glass of water from a pitcher on a small table. She looked at him while she drank the whole thing, and he had the impression that she was reassessing him, though whether for better or worse seemed unclear.

“We've got two more months of this,” she said.

“That's right.”

“I don't think I'm going to make it.”

“Make it, how?”

“Hold together.”

“Do you have to hold together?”

“Do you only ask questions?”

“Mostly.”

“Do you like it? Your job asking questions?”

“Most days.”

“But not today?”

“Today's not so bad.”

“Would you tell me if it was?”

“Not in so many words.”

“Why not?”

“If you think you're getting my paycheck by asking the questions, you're mistaken.”

He was smiling again. She tried to smile back but she didn't think the expression her face made was exactly a smile.

“Why do you think you have to hold together?”

“I just do.”

“That's interesting.”

She heard the sound of his pen scratching at his notepad. It seemed to go on for a long time.

The hermit crab was walking around again. She watched it, waited for the angelfish to circle around and swivel its eye at her. How many loops had that goddamned fish made while she was sitting here? How many would it make in the months or years before the good doctor found it floating at the top of the tank? Was there an angel in charge of angelfish who knew that number? Would there be two numbers, one for clockwise, one for counterclockwise?

The doctor was working his lips because they were about to dilate and birth another question disguised as an imperative. He was going to say,
Tell me again about the people with the shining eyes and the sharp teeth.
They were forty minutes into their hour and that was when he usually tried to get her to talk about her car monsters. She had begun to say that she wasn't sure she saw them, that the trauma of the accident and Glen's disappearance must have made her remember things that weren't there. This was the answer he wanted to hear, but he wanted to believe her and he didn't yet.

She would scream if he made her lie again. She would scream if he asked her another question of any kind right now. She needed at least one more fish-lap before she got another arbitrary, time-wasting prompt from this overeducated, overpaid, deeply sad man.

His lips parted. The tip of his tongue mashed up against his palate,
he was about to manufacture the
tuh
in
tell
, and if he did, she would shriek so loud the angelfish's brain would swell, it would leak blood from its head and circle the tank leaving a murky wake, a depth-charged sub, a shot-up fighter plane, a car rolling on the desert floor throwing coins and potato chips.

She had to intercept that
tuh
.

They spoke simultaneously.

“Tell . . .”

“I want to be quiet now. I just want to sit here and be quiet.”