“What the hell?” she says.
He says, “What do you mean?”
“Where are you?”
“What?” He’s still half in his dream. He goes to check on Hendrick, who’s still sleeping.
“We said I’d take Hen out for pancakes. I’m parked in our goddamn driveway. Your truck is across the street. Rena’s car is across the street. I’m standing here looking at them. Nobody’s home over here. So what I want to know is, where the hell are you?”
He looks out the window. She’s standing in their front yard, by the lamppost. He can’t remember anything about pancakes. Doesn’t matter. Here she is. “I’m over here,” he says.
“Where’s over here?”
“In the house,” he says.
“In the house.” She looks over. “In that house?”
“Yes.”
“With her?”
“Yes.”
“And Hendrick?”
“Yes.”
“OK,” she says. “Guess what? I’m coming over.”
“Wait,” he says.
“For what?”
“I need to make some coffee.”
“You want me to wait while you make coffee.”
“Please,” he says. “Yes.”
“What am I supposed to do?”
“Just give me five minutes,” he says. “Let me get Hen up. Let me make coffee.”
“He’s not up?”
“No.”
“He never sleeps this late.”
“I know that,” he says.
She stands in the yard. It’s strange, seeing her out there and hearing her on the phone. “Fuck you, OK, Jack?” she says. “What is this?”
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“Five minutes. Get him up. I’m still taking him out for pancakes. Whatever you’ve got going on over there doesn’t change that.”
“OK,” he says. “Thanks.”
“Fuck you,” she says again, quietly. And she hangs up, puts her phone in her pocket, turns around, and walks up into their house. Jack measures a few breaths in and out. He thinks about grabbing Hen, grabbing whatever else he can carry, driving to Mexico. Mexico might work. They could hide out down there for a decade or so, let this all blow over. Instead, he makes himself go to the kitchen to get coffee started. Grounds and water. The pot sizzles on its metal plate. Rena comes out, her hair bent at funny angles. “Hello,” she says.
“Hi,” he says.
“Who was on the phone?”
“Beth. She’s across the street.”
“She’s what?”
“Across the street.”
“Like
here
across the street?” She goes to the front door. “Holy shit, Jack, her car’s here.”
“I know,” he says. “That’s what I’m telling you.”
“This is bad,” she says.
“It’s not that bad.” He hears himself say that.
It’s not that bad.
He doesn’t believe it.
“It’s pretty fucking bad.”
“I know,” he says.
“Did you tell her I was here?”
“She sort of knew already.”
“Oh, great.”
“I didn’t go into any detail.”
“What do you mean, detail?”
“I mean I didn’t say anything other than that you were here.”
“Maybe we can still make this OK,” she says. “Maybe there’s still something we could do.”
“I don’t think there’s anything we can do,” he says. “We’re here. You’re here. She knows.”
And what happens is that Rena starts laughing. She covers her mouth at first, tries to keep it in, but she gives up on that soon enough, gives over to a kind of whole-body silent laughing. She’s shaking, holding a hand out toward him, making some signal to tell him, he thinks, to leave her be, that she’s OK, and then she’s laughing harder, making noise now, and he just stands there and watches her go. Finally she takes a huge breath, gets an
I’m sorry
out, turns both hands out at him, palms flat.
“Are you OK?” he says, and that starts her up again. She’s bent over at the waist. She keeps making these high-pitched wails. He has no idea what to do. “It’s not that funny,” he says.
“Oh, God, I know,” she says, still laughing, sliding down the wall until she’s sitting on the front hall floor. “Oh, no,” she says.
“Why are you doing that?”
“Because,” she says. “This is what happens. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” She catches her breath, slows down. “Oh, fuck, Jack, she’s going to kill us. She’s going to kill me, anyway.” She wipes her eyes, keeps laughing a little bit. “I laugh when I’m nervous,” she says.
“It’s not funny,” he says again.
“It is,” she says. “A little bit. It has to be.” She looks up at him. “What do you think you’re going to tell her?”
He pours them some coffee. “What should I tell her?”
“It better be something good,” she says, and giggles.
“Maybe I won’t tell her anything,” he says.
“Maybe she won’t ask,” Rena says.
“She’ll ask,” he says. “You would.”
“You could tell her—” She stands back up, sniffs. “I know. Tell her I cut my leg, and you’re just here to help out. I hear that one works.” She opens the front door, and they both look at Beth’s wagon in the driveway over there. Rena pushes the screen door open a few inches, lets it fall back. The throw clicks in the latch. “You could tell her I need a kidney and you’re the only match.” She pushes the door open again. “We could say there was a gas leak in my condo,” she says. “Or a bomb scare. A baby in a well.”
“Those are good.” He expects Beth to walk across the street at any moment. The low light makes everything on the street look greener, somehow. “Those are all good.” Frank’s cat is curled up in the driveway under the wheel of his Cadillac.
“Listen,” she says. “I’m still glad I’m here, OK? I just want to say that. I mean, I’m not sorry about what happened. Whatever she’s getting ready to do to us, I’m not sorry.”
“Me, too,” he says. Except that he is sorry, or he’s some version of it, guilty enough about having done this, because surely this is not what you do. He’s just not so sorry he wishes it hadn’t happened. He’s in the damn middle. He doesn’t feel like he’s gotten even, or like he’s exacted any kind of revenge. Mainly what he feels like is that he’s gone to bed with Rena, something that had never occurred to him was really possible in any kind of actual way, and so it didn’t exist. Now it feels bizarre. It’s not that he wants to take it back. It’s that he’s been awake five minutes, and everything that was wrong with him yesterday is still and completely wrong with him today, and it all might be getting much worse. He wonders if you can drive past Mexico. If you can drive over the Panama Canal and all the way down to Chile. To Uruguay. To Argentina. “I’ve got to wake Hen up,” he says. “I told her I’d get him up.”
“Go ahead,” she says, and sits down in one of the chairs. “I’m good.”
“You can sit in the back if you want to,” he says. “You can hide out somewhere.”
“Maybe I will when she gets here,” says Rena. “But go ahead. Do your thing.”
He leaves her there in the living room, in his living room, goes in and stands over Hendrick, who’s awake now, staring at the ceiling. “Hey, buddy,” he says. Hen’s whispering the song to the Allgood Construction commercial.
The smartest way to do your home work is Allgood.
If Hen could understand it—if he could explain it to him—what is it he’d say?
Honey, Mommy’s coming over in a few minutes, and she may be a little bit upset.
He gets out some clothes. It already smells the same over here, or mostly the same. There’s a new dust smell, the smell of this air conditioner instead of theirs, but Hen’s room smells like Hen’s room, the odor of a little boy sleeping, a cereal smell. What to tell Beth: That he needed a change of scenery, same as she did. That he and Rena went out for some pizza. That after that they went to Mulch City and made an enormous mistake on purpose. He gets Hen into a pair of jeans, some socks, a Spider-Man shirt at least one size too big for him. He won’t wear any shoes, keeps kicking his feet away, so Jack just hands him his sneakers, and Hen takes them with him out into the den.
“Good morning,” Hen says to Rena, like he’s any kid in any house.
“Good morning,” she says back.
“Today I will be carrying my shoes.” Full sentences. More and more he speaks in full, relevant sentences.
“OK,” Rena tells Hen. “I think that’s just fine.”
The doorbell rings. Yul Brynner flies down the hall, barking, announcing imminent attack.
Hen turns to Jack. “Daddy, someone is at the door,” he says, leaving space between each word.
“Do you want to get it?” Jack asks him, trying to act like Hen acting normal is normal.
“WFMY News 2 is the name you can trust,” Hen says. “When news breaks in the Triad, turn to News 2.”
Jack wishes he had something good to say to Rena, one last thing, but he doesn’t. The dog’s still barking. He goes to the door with Jack, wags like hell when he sees it’s Beth. “Hi,” Jack says, because the only other thing he can think to say is absurd:
Welcome to our home.
“Give him to me,” she says, looking him right in the eye.
“Hang on,” he says. There’s a wren in a tree in the yard, screeching at them.
“Give him to me.”
“I’m going to. I just want to—”
“I’ll bring him back, Jack, goddamnit. That’s not what I’m saying. Just give him to me so I don’t have to stand here and look like—whatever I look like right now. I’ll bring him back in a little while, and we can deal with whatever else there is then, OK?”
“Fine,” he says.
“Where is she?”
“Rena?”
“Who do you think I mean?”
“She’s here. In here.”
“Don’t think this has anything to do with you,” Beth calls into the house.
“OK,” Rena says, from her chair.
Beth takes a step inside. “You’re right there,” she says.
“Yeah.” She doesn’t say anything else, doesn’t apologize.
“How the hell are you right there?”
“It’s hard to say, exactly,” Rena says.
“You’re not embarrassed?”
“I am,” she says. “Plenty.”
“You seem more relaxed than embarrassed.”
Rena doesn’t answer. They stare at each other. “Hello,” Hendrick says, still holding his shoes. Jack feels like his brain is evaporating through his eyes.
“Hi, sweetie,” Beth says, bending down.
“
¿Como estás?
” he says.
She puts a hand on his cheek. “
Perfecta,
” she says. “
¿Y tú?
”
“
Perfecto,
” he says. “
Perfecto.
” He holds onto the word, says it syllable by syllable.
Beth looks around, takes in the house, the plastic chairs, the TV on its box. She stands back up. “What is it you two think you’re doing with the furniture in here?”
Jack says, “It was in the garage.”
“This is how you live now?”
“I guess so,” he says.
“You know what?” She picks up a chair by the arm, sets it back down. “I don’t know who’s crazier. You, for doing this, or you,” she says, turning hard on Rena, “for dating him.”
“I’m not dating him,” she says.
“You like this?” Beth asks her.
“I’m here,” she says. “I’m just here.”
“You’re not just here. You don’t get to be just here.”
It’s all sliding somewhere, slipping. He says, “What if, instead—”
“I’m talking,” Beth says. “OK? I’m talking to Rena.”
“Sure,” he says.
She looks at the wall. “What is that a map of?” She’s not talking to Rena.
“Canada,” he tells her. “Some islands in Canada.”
“Show me his room.”
“It’s the same one.”
She pushes past him into the hall, opens his door, stops in the doorway. “It’s the same,” she says.
“I know.”
“I saw it over there. I saw it empty, I mean, so I figured you’d done this.”
“I did.”
“But I wanted to see it,” she says. “It looks the same. Exactly the same.”
“I know.”
“I like the pictures of the plants.”
“Shrubs,” he says. “From a catalog.”
“The catalog? You cut it up?”
“A different one.”
She flicks the overhead light on, then off. “He’s eating, right?”
“Yes.”
“He’s sleeping? You’re putting him to bed on time?”
“I’m trying to,” he says.
“Any more criminal activity, Jack? Have you painted your name on the water tower?”
“No,” he says, but that’s an idea. Maybe he should paint something up there. A blanket apology, an admission of guilt. Or just PLEASE SEND HELP
.
She turns around, lowers her voice. “I don’t get it,” she says. It almost sounds like she’s pleading with him.
“Get what?”
“What are you doing? What’s she doing here?”
“What are you doing?” he asks her right back, whispering. “Isn’t it the same?”
“It’s not the same,” she says. “It’s not the same at all.” She reaches for a picture hook in the wall, spins it around. It’s all starting to press down on him. He can’t believe he’s really done this. He thinks he might cry, standing there, Rena in the other room and Beth right here. And he thinks Beth might, too, from the look on her face. Maybe he has done the one thing he could not do. Maybe the rules are different for him than they are for her.
“He’s still speaking Spanish,” she says.
“He is.”
“That’s good, right? That has to be good.”
“Yeah,” Jack says. “It is.”
“I can’t be in here with her here,” she says, looking at the floor.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“You fuck off,” she says, her voice small.
“I didn’t—”
“You didn’t what?”
He doesn’t answer. He can’t tell what he’s supposed to say.
“I’m leaving,” she says. “We’re going. We have to go.” She slides around him, back into the front room. She’s in a hurry now, getting angry again. He can’t blame her. And angry’s better, easier. “When do you want him back?” she says.