Bleeder (17 page)

“That’s Pleiades,” I say.

“Oh, I think that’s the loop of Orion’s belt,” she says, pointing up to the twinkling canvas.

I rub my hand across the smooth skin of her belly, snuggle against her.

“Do you think this is how we’ll be for the rest of our lives?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “Of course, we’re still young and all that, but I’d like to think that this is how it could be. That’s nice to think about.”

“It is.”

SUNSET UPON THE HEART

S
EPTEMBER 1994
. A
T THE END OF SUMMER
, N
EW
H
ANOVER
H
IGH
School in downtown Wilmington hires me to assist with mentally handicapped students. Dad is happy that I sign insurance forms, Mom that I have a “real” job. And on that first day, as the students arrive, I stand in the doorway and shake hands as I am introduced by the classroom teacher, Mrs. McRae. Those returning from the year before already know the teacher, the classroom, and the school, but a few are as new to this place as me. They walk slowly, drop their shy heads low and—often escorted by a mother who coaxes them into staying—they are left in my care. I take one of their hands—a student with Down syndrome named James whose easy smile and full round face reminds me of Louise—and I show him where to stow his lunch, hang his bookbag, and then sit. I give him a deck of playing cards that he spreads out upon his desk, setting the cards in straight and even rows.

After the bell rings, the class settles down and we go over the introductions and classroom rules; then Mrs. McRae doles out change for the math lesson. I stroll the room and cast glances at their worksheets. Sylvia fumbles the change in her hand and appears to count it, but cannot. I go to her.

“What is this?” I ask, pointing to a tarnished nickel, laid flat on the desk in front of her.

“A quarter,” she says.

“No, look again.”

She examines the coin, raises her head to my eyes. “A quarter,” she says again. I lift the coin and hold it in front of her, spinning the nickel between my thumb and index finger, and I ask her to think about it, guess the coin. Sylvia lunges toward it, scrutinizes her eyes against the silver, then leans back. “You have pretty hair,” she says, reaching out to touch my head.

“No, no, no.” I politely deflect her advancing arm. “We’re not talking about hair. We’re doing math. Counting money.” I pick up a quarter from her stack, hold it flat against my palm. “Now, Sylvia. What is this coin?”

She looks to it, staring blank-eyed. “A quarter.”

“Good. Now how much is a quarter worth?”

Sylvia opens both hands, extends her fingers. “Ten cent.”

In the neighboring desk, Jason has begun to listen. “No, no, no,” he says, fetching a quarter from his pile. He pretends he’s Sylvester Stallone—big muscles, big man. “Quarter is twenty-five cents.” He fishes one more from his pile, then reaches into Sylvia’s stash for another. “Three quarters is Coca-Cola.” He slaps his desk table, laughs, and tries to pocket the quarters.

“No,” I tell Jason. “That money is for learning, not spending.”

“Oh, yeah, yeah . . . Sorry.” Jason de-pockets the quarters and grabs his pencil to finish his worksheet while Sylvia watches. Then she reaches for Jason.

“He has pretty hair,” she says.

“Get your hands away from me.” Jason leaps from his chair, tenses his arms, and squints his eyes. “Don’t mess with me,” he commands in an unnaturally thick and deep voice.

“All right, all right,” I interject. “Nobody’s messing with anybody. Get back to work and finish your assignment.”

Reluctantly Jason sits while Sylvia, mouth agape, stares vacantly at the shampoo sheen of his black hair.

“Quit looking,” he says, separating his desk from hers.

“Quit looking, Sylvia,” I say. “You need to do your homework.”

“Okay, Mitch.”

“No. I’m Shelby.”

“You have pretty hair like Mitch from
Baywatch
.”

“Sylvia. Do your homework.”

Sylvia smiles, lobs her head back in laughter and again tells me how pretty my hair is. “You pretty.” I thank her for the compliment, advise her to do her work, and move on to another student.

The classroom soon assumes a familiar schedule: math and language in the mornings; lunch; and job and community skills in the afternoons. And then we all grow anxious for the buses to arrive. In a job like this, there is very little time to sit and rest. I must patrol the classroom and teach standing. A lousy teacher, I understand, would laze at his desk and only occasionally take a turn of the room. So Mrs. McRae and I stroll the room as good teachers should, and consequently my ankles swell, as I find gravity and endless standing other nemeses of the hemophiliac.

At my apartment, my body tired and hurting, my ankle now a bulbous anchor swinging from my spindly leg, I factor. Two weeks ago, I had a similar problem and phoned in sick, and the week before that as well, and now I’m out of sick days and must lose pay; and in addition, it all looks very bad to miss so much work, especially for a new employee, but yet I am injured again and cannot walk without causing further injury. By missing tomorrow, I might actually have the chance to return and miss less later. At least this is the mental back-and-forth I go through before picking up the phone to call my supervisor at home. To explain my string of absences, I relate that I have an old childhood injury that has been flaring up.

“Oh, did you injure yourself playing football? Or soccer? Or something like that?” she inquires, trying to understand my increasing absences.

“No, neither. It’s a childhood injury, like I said.”

“Oh.” And then there’s a long pause before the supervisor comes back to me. “Okay, well . . . I guess we’ll get a sub. Hope you feel better soon,” she says. “The children miss you when you are out.”

“And I miss the money,” I think to myself.

I place an ice pack on my ankle and fall asleep on the couch until the phone rings. It’s Mom wanting to catch up and see how I am doing. “I’m fine,” I lie (no reason to get her involved in this). “Good, good. You like the job?” “It’s fine, too.” And we chat a bit, hang up, and then I try to nap before
the phone again rings. It’s Kaitlin telling me that she’s running late and not to wait dinner on her because she needs another hour or so at the library.

“I’ll just grab something on my way,” she says.

“Okay.”

Deciding it’s too late for a nap, I heat some soup, refresh my ice pack, and turn on the TV. I nevertheless fall asleep until Kaitlin knocks on my door, wakes me, and we snuggle ourselves into bed. The light off, the quiet night descends upon us. Kaitlin shifts, turns on her side, on her back, turns back onto her side.

“It’s not the same,” she whispers.

“What’s not the same?”

“Us. This.”

I roll over to face her, but she averts my eyes and stares at the ceiling, at nothing while her face is cast in the silver shadow of moonlit dark.

“We used to study together, but now you don’t have any studying to do. Plus, you’re too tired to even stay awake, or your ankles hurt too much, and so we don’t do much of anything. At least not together. We meet and we sleep and sometimes we eat together. It just feels different somehow. Like something’s changed.”

I sigh. “I’m just adjusting to this job. That’s all. It’s a lot harder than being a little cabana boy at a yacht club, and it makes me feel pretty awful sometimes. So yes, that’s changed. But I can’t help it. I’m trying my best.”

“Yeah, I know, but you’re at work all day and then you’re asleep all night and we’re hardly talking.” She sighs out heavily. “What are we doing?” She looks at me, her cobalt eyes holding steady in the void of night.

“Living, I guess. Gathering our rosebuds while we may.”

“Oh, Herrick’s no good to us now.”

“Yes. I suppose not.”

I slip toward her, kissing her check and neck, trying to bait her lust. She pulls away and brushes me off.

“Not tonight, okay. I’m not in the mood.”

I shuffle back to my side of the bed and lie still as my frustrated desire softens.

“Are we ever going to have sex?” I whisper out.

“Oh, that again.”

“Well, are we? We’ve been dating over a year now.”

“I don’t know. I told you from the start how I felt.”

“Are you afraid of me? Of it? Is that what this abstinence is about? If it is, please just tell me so I can deal with it.”

“No,” she defends. “That’s not it at all. I also made that clear when we started going out.”

She rolls onto her side, her back facing me. The moonlight slanting through my blinds crisscrosses our bodies, while outside I hear the soft tread of a neighbor walking her dog and a voice placating, “Good boy. That’s a good boy.”

Sometime later, I fall asleep.

The next evening, having been home from work and now feeling better, I call Kaitlin and leave a message. I call again and apologize and say that I’ll work on spicing things up. And later, I again call, but having heard nothing from Kaitlin, I begin to worry. I try to read for solace, but cannot. Halfhourly, I phone her apartment until, eventually, her roommate answers.

“I’m trying not to get involved,” she says, “but Kaitlin’s not here and you can’t keep calling. I’m sure it’s nothing, that she’s probably just studying late or something, but seriously, I can’t even watch TV for the phone ringing.”

“Okay, sorry. Just let her know I’ve called.”

“I did that the first time you left a message.”

I pace my carpet, limp around on my stiff ankle. I go outside and sit on the steps overlooking the parking lot, and each time a car pulls in, I try to discern in the dark if it’s Kaitlin returning from a late-night study session. But it never is and at two o’clock, I can take it no more. My heart squeezes blood in tight, palsied pumps. I tremble uneasily.

The husk of night shrouds around me and the bright stars pierce light past a hidden moon as I raise my hand and gently knock on Kaitlin’s apartment door. The guff of a car comes to me, and I quickly spin round to see if it’s Kaitlin, but it is not and the car passes. I knock again, louder. Nothing. I bang again and again so that the metal clapper clamors through the silent darkness, and soon a yellow ebb of light glows from within. The bolt clicks,
and when the door opens I feebly smile to Kaitlin’s roommate as she sleepily gestures for me to come in. “I’m so sorry,” I say. “I’m so sorry.” Without saying a word, the roommate relocks the door and ambles off to her bedroom at the hallway’s end. I am left alone in the dark apartment.

I fumble my way toward Kaitlin’s room, and when I open her door, I search for some sign that may explain her disappearance, but there is none. Her room is as it always is: neat and orderly. I crawl beneath her sheets and wait. Everything falls silent. The faint sniff of her perfume upon the sheets reminds me of her and I ache in a way far different from those pains caused by my hemophilia. I thrum my fingers upon the mattress, toss right and left, fluff up the pillows underneath my head, and when the sun rises and Kaitlin has still not come home, I rummage through her desk, find paper and a pencil, and write a short note, describing as best I can my insufferable night. I tell her that my heart feels skewered, a spit stuck through its center and roasting, but this then seems too much, so I ball it up, force it into my pants pocket and begin again.
Call me,
I write, and then leave.

At my apartment, I brew coffee—extra strong today—and dress for work. Kaitlin calls before I’m off.

“I’m sorry,” she says to my sullen hello. “I should have called.”

“Where were you?”

“With a friend.” There is a long pause. An empty pall settles upon me. Her tone tells me all I need to know. “I know you have to work, but we have to talk. How about tonight? Dinner?”

“What time?” I ask, my voice staying flat, unemotive, and drained of any willingness to appear anything but hurt, dejected, lost. I am numb.

“Five?” Kaitlin offers.

“Okay.”

And we hang up. The long night has ended. A new day begins.

Too early for work, I drive to the riverfront park and sit in my cab to think. A barge slugs out to sea and, furrowing the waterway, churns an auburn foam from the murky river. The sky is clouded over and a steady rain begins to pummel down and spill onto the rivertop. It comes heavy and relentless,
glazing my windshield. I breathe in, and then a great sorrow comes out of me as the rain, too, cries.

When Kaitlin and I meet, it is early. In the diner, an old man sits alone and sips a cup of coffee, his hand trembling with age. I walk to a window booth where Kaitlin waits, and I shake off the rain from my coat as Kaitlin stands. We hug, then I sit and look outside at the drip of rainwater spilling from the diner’s gutters. The waitress comes, and when we order I catch Kaitlin’s eyes. She smiles but says nothing. We return to watching the traffic. And later, when our food arrives, I organize my plate, take a few bites, and then fix Kaitlin with a stare.