Carter Clay (26 page)

“I love you, too, Kitty,” M.B. says in a determined if shaky voice. She steps between an end table and the wall. “Come on out, kid.” M.B. crouches down, then whispers, “What'll Carter think? Come on out now.”

The couch shifts as Katherine tries to find a way under it. “Don't hurt me!” she cries.

“Nobody's even near you, Kitty!” M.B. says, then flashes a look of fury Jersey's way.

“I luh everybody!” Katherine squawks, and Carter Clay looks at his hands and wishes himself far away. What the girl said about the accident and God—he wishes he had not heard that. In one of the pep talks he conducted as he drove to Palm Gate Village, Carter told himself:
If things are bad, just pretend you're in a cell, praying. Just pretend you ain't there at all.

Fat chance of that.

Again, Katherine squawks, “I luh-v everybody!” and Carter, his own voice quaking, says, “That's good, Katherine. That's what Jesus wants us all to feel. And we all love you, too.”

“Please!”
Jersey lifts her hands high in the air, wags them over her head. “I mean, I'm sorry, Mr. Clay, but—she only said that because she's scared.”

“No.” M.B. backs out from behind the end table, in the process setting one of the ivory lamp shades tapping, tapping, and she glances at it—yes?—before continuing on: “What you don't understand, Jersey, is Kitty's got faith in Jesus now. She don't ever have to be afraid again.”

“Jesus?”
Jersey stares at the trembling couch, its irregular shakes and jumps. “You want to know what she thought of Jesus before the accident, M.B.? She thought if Jesus was the son of God, and he really did save people, it was because God knew he needed to
apologize
for the mess he made. She considered herself a—pagan! That's what she said! She was a pagan, because she worshiped order in the nature of things, not some big old God on high!”

“Whoa,” Carter Clay murmurs, “whoa.” He waves a silencing hand at the girl, then goes to the end of the couch and calls, “Hey, Katherine, why don't you come out now?”

A moment later, Katherine's face comes into view—smiling, if teary-eyed—and Katherine takes Carter Clay's proffered hand and steps out from behind the couch.

“That's better now, isn't it?” he says.

Jersey stares at him, hard, when he keeps hold of Katherine's hand and twists the wedding band back and forth on Katherine's third finger. “Safecracker,” Jersey mumbles.

“What?”

Her audacity astonishes her, but is she to be polite when she feels their lives are spinning out of control?

She holds up her own hand and imitates the twisting motion that Mr. Clay makes with her mother's ring. “You look like a safecracker,” she says, “trying a lock.”

He looks down at Katherine's hand in his. “I didn't neither,” he says. “You just thought I did, I guess.”

As if he has said something extremely foolish—outrageous, even—Jersey widens her eyes and laughs. In fact, Mr. Clay is at least partly right, and she knows this is so. It is unlikely that her comparison of him to a safecracker would have occurred to anyone but herself, and it may have occurred to her only because she is trying so hard to find a way to understand what on earth he is doing in their lives, and how he got there in the first place.

“Well, I suppose I better head home,” he says.

M.B. glances at the girl, now turning her chair back to the television: so rude! Still, M.B. manages to summon a pleasant smile for Carter Clay and to say, “We certainly do thank you for coming by! Taking time from your busy life—”

“LRHHHH!” The voice on the reactivated videotape jumps at them. Everyone startles. “Sorry,” Jersey says as she lowers the volume to a normal level.

“You'll have to come back soon,” M.B. continues.

“I hope to do that.”

Katherine looks up at Carter Clay. “You go-ing?”

“I'll see you tomorrow. At church. And you too, Jersey.”

Jersey lifts her hand in a wave without turning away from her show.

“If you like,” says M.B., “you could stop by after church, and tell us what you thought of the sermon. I think Katherine'd like that, wouldn't you, Katherine? Have some pie and coffee?”

Katherine smiles at Carter Clay, who says, “Sounds like a plan to me!”

“That Jersey,” M.B. whispers as she sees Carter Clay out the door. “I apologize.”

He shakes his head. He feels a little dizzy. “No need,” he says. “She's got—a hard thing. It must be—hard.”

“I do what I can, but I'm a little late in life to take care of the both of them.”

“Well”—he hesitates, then plunges on—“that's what I'm here for, though. I want to do all I can to help. Katherine—” It is a false start and he finds he cannot take it anywhere. “So, goodnight, then,” he says.

“One good thing, though,” blurts M.B., “I mean, for her and Jersey's future, she's got money. From insurance and all. And they got a house and all—”

He shakes his head. “That's good,” he says, but he does not want to hear more, and he takes a step backward, and turns and hurries to the stairwell.

For a time, M.B. remains on the balcony, afraid to go inside, afraid of what Jersey might see on her face.
She's got money. From insurance and all.
How much did I shame myself then? she wonders.

When Carter Clay appears in the parking lot below, whistling “Blue Velvet,” M.B. makes him into a stranger, no one who has anything to do with her life. She holds onto the wrought iron railing of the balcony and it carries her back to the railing on either side of the front stoop of the house in Gary. Lorne repainted those rails every year. A shiny black like fresh tar. It took forever to dry. She remembers watching him paint the rails. He wore a pair of old wingtip oxfords when he painted. His painting shoes. So ancient they were hard as flint. She could look out the window of the front room and see him painting. He was not the sort you
told,
“Hey, you missed a spot there.”
He would make you pay for that sort of thing, and, anyway, you could be sure he'd find every spot before he finished. Even now, when he is dead, M.B. remains slightly astonished that Lorne—Lorne Milhause—married her. Not that she mistook him for the most wonderful man in the world and not that there were never other men who wanted to marry her and not that she wasn't a hard worker and careful with money and clean and all. Still, that someone married her and stayed married to her forty-two years—it is so extraordinary, it often feels like something that must have happened to somebody else.

Though it is not impossible to train wild birds to eat from your hand, the process requires patience. First, provide a regular and plentiful supply of seed on a feeding station attached beneath a window. Be patient. After establishing a regular feeding schedule, add a glove and hat to the station, and place seed on
only
the palm of the glove and the crown of the hat. Be patient. Eventually, the birds will take seeds from the glove and the hat. After they have done so for several weeks, open the window, and while still standing inside, place your hand in the seed-filled glove on the station. Be patient. Be still. Eventually, the birds will feed from both the hat and your gloved hand. After several weeks of this, go outdoors. Stand beside the empty feeder with the seed-filled hat on your head. Lay your gloved hand, full of seed, on the feeder. Be patient. Be still. Do not try to look the birds in the eye. Do not allow the birds to see you swallow; they may take you for a predator, and flee. Practice. Be patient. Eventually, the birds will fly to you when you walk out of your house wearing your hat and glove. Practice more, and, if you are very lucky and very patient, the birds may one day fly to your bare head or shoulders or hands.

Jersey knows these procedures, as they were the ones followed by her mother in order to establish a relationship with the birds of the family's Arizona neighborhood. Thus when Katherine first started coming to Palm Gate Village for weekends, Jersey
tried to convince M.B. that a feeding station at the kitchen window would be good for Katherine. M.B., however, protested: the other residents would have kittens over such a mess on their balcony, and she was already in dutch over their staying at her place!

Though she has no feeder, early each evening Jersey goes out on the balcony, closes her eyes to slits, and sits with seed-filled hands resting on the arms of her wheelchair.

Not expecting much—no Florida bird has ever come even close to taking a seed—she sits there now. It is quiet. The men who were spreading tar and gravel on the roof of carport H have taken their radios and departed. Now the only sounds are birdsong and the noise of cars moving through the parking lots that wind among Palm Gate Village's many buildings. Jersey thinks of her father, and how, at a time like this, he would say, with a sigh,

What did it come from? Who was the author?

The Hannigans and the Munros, who go out for the Early Bird Special each Saturday, advance down the balcony in her direction, and, to avoid striking them as too odd, Jersey opens her eyes wider and smiles. Hello, she says, and the adults say hello, too—as moved by the solemn girl in her wheelchair as she is moved by them in their clouds of perfume and aftershave, the men in blazers and plaid pants, the women in silky dresses whose belted skirts fall in soft folds. (M.B. often makes fun of the Hannigans and Munros. When M.B. rises up on tiptoe to imitate the mincing way the women walk in their high heels; when she giggles behind her hands at their trumped-up girlishness, Jersey laughs along, but also supposes—correctly—that the women lead the sort of sweet retirement life that M.B. meant for herself and Lorne.)

The next noise in the parking lot: the arrival of Carter Clay's old van.

It unnerves Jersey that she can feel Carter Clay come up the concrete stairs. The vibrations of his tread travel up her wheels, into the chair frame, and, then, into her own skeleton.

“Hey!” he says when he reaches the balcony. Hey, he's just come from working on a doohickey that will let Jersey come for a ride in his van! A brace kind of thing. “I read how to do it in a library book,” he adds, then gives her a happy and conspiratorial wink, as if to say the library is just one more thing they have in common these days.

Jersey does her best to smile. She does not notice the way Carter Clay holds onto the balcony railing as he speaks—squeezing so hard that the knuckles in his hands bleach white. She cannot know that Carter Clay is still upset from a conversation that occurred when Pastor Bitner asked him to come by his office today. Pastor Bitner wanted to warn Carter that Katherine Milhause might “mistake” Carter's special friendship toward her family for romantic interest in her.

An unpleasant series of moments for Carter: when he said that he hoped eventually to ask Katherine to marry him, then witnessed the astonished and suspicious look that clouded Pastor Bitner's face before he asked, “Why are you doing this, Carter?”

Carter had assumed Pastor Bitner would approve, and so he felt hurt and looked away when he answered, “A husband's supposed to take care of his wife for better or worse, right?”

Pastor Bitner put his hand beneath the big leaf of the plant that grew in a pot beside his office desk. Pastor Bitner lifted the leaf with the back of that hand, lowered it. “But—you're not her husband, Carter.”

“Right! She needs a husband, though! If her husband were alive, he'd take care of her. Not that I'd mean to—you know, it wouldn't be with sexual relations. I'd just be there to take care of her and Jersey.”

It had occurred to Carter in the past that some people might suppose that he was a pervert or money-grubber if he married Katherine; but he had never worried that Pastor Bitner might be one of them.

“Jersey”—Carter plucks a few of the girl's sunflower seeds from her open hands and sets them, one by one, on the balcony's wrought iron railing. “You know I care about you and your mom?”

Sometimes, when Jersey throws the sunflower seeds in her hands over the railing, she imagines that, one day, she will look over the railing and find the giant faces of sunflowers poking up from the evergreens below. But not now. Now, she wipes her hands on her skirt and says, as politely as possible, “You really don't know us, though, Mr. Clay.”

He shakes his head. “That don't matter.”

“Of course it matters!”

In Mr. Clay's company, Jersey finds the air suddenly dense and spongy. Though she would like to wheel away from him and this conversation entirely, she lowers her voice and she says, “Look, Mr. Clay, before the accident, in the morning, my mom listened to Bach and did the
Times
crossword. She—was a vegan! She was a volunteer bird-bander. Her idea of fun was trying to figure out how a fossil, broken in a million pieces, could be fit back together again.”

Carter nods. Though unnerved by what the girl says—he has never heard of bird-banders or whatever that V-thing was—he knows he has a card to play, and he plays it now without hesitation. “But, Jersey, if your mom's not herself now, maybe I know who she is now better than you do.”

Jersey peers out over the balcony. It is possible, looking to the east, to see into the streets of the nearby neighborhood of modest single-family homes, rooftops blanching silver as the streetlights tremble to life.

It is a beauteous evening, calm and free—

When she looks up at Mr. Clay again, the sadness on his big face startles her—sometimes, that sadness of his almost makes him seem a kinsman—but she feels a pressing need to turn the conversation in another direction, and she says, “What would you bet I can guess any number you think of between one and one million within twenty-five guesses?”

“Twenty-five guesses?” He smiles at M.B., who has now
appeared behind the condo's storm door, smiling. “Twenty-five seems like a lot of guesses, Jersey!”

Jersey ignores the sound of the storm door opening. “A lot?” she says. “Do you know how much a million is? To count to a million requires eleven days and four hours—”

“None of us is interested in that, Jersey,” says M.B., her voice a little strained by the fact that she is now pulling Katherine—awkward in spaghetti-strap dress and high heels—onto the balcony. “Don't she look pretty, Carter?”

He nods. “Real nice. You ready for dinner, Katherine?”

Katherine does not nod or shake her head. She likes this Carter's face, his rosy lips and blue eyes. Still, she wonders if maybe she should go back inside to the television set for company, reengage her fingers with their bit of fuzzy wool. She does not like outside, the way outside's clouds boss the trees and houses. See? Still, there is one good thing: Jersey is not invited to go to the restaurant with Katherine and Carter. Jersey is staying with M.B. Katherine likes that. Jersey always pushes Katherine: do flash cards, take walks, listen to music, look at books and birds. Once, Katherine got so tired of Jersey's prodding that she hit Jersey in the face with a big book. Blood came out Jersey's nose and she cried, but Katherine said, “Don't you tell!” and Jersey never did.

“How's your weekend going?” So Carter asks as he opens the door of the van for Katherine. Katherine does not answer—merely looks back at the balcony, where M.B. stands, waving good-bye.

“M.B. like you,” says Katherine, “but not Jers'!”

Though he is not sure whether Katherine means that M.B. does not like Jersey, or that Jersey does not like
him
, Carter asks—in the interests of keeping the conversation going—“Why not?”

“Sec-
ret
,” Katherine says.

While she laughs her noisy, gulping laugh, Carter makes his trip around the van to the driver's door.
Secret.
The word affects him bodily. He wipes at his upper lip. He thinks again of his conversation with Pastor Bitner.
I guess I must look like a suspicious
character
, he said to Pastor Bitner, and Pastor Bitner did not say,
no, no, of course not, Carter.

“Hey, Car-ter.” As he climbs inside the van, Katherine—now serious—reaches over to tap his arm. Opens her eyes wide. “Want to know the sec-
ret
?”

“Well”—he sets his elbows on the steering wheel, and looks out the windshield—“you sure you should tell?”

“It's jus-
t
”—Katherine lowers her eyelids and sighs—“Jers' thinks you are no'
smar-t.”

Carter busies himself with backing out of the parking lot. The way he figures, God must help people learn to love their wives in places like India where marriages are arranged. So if he marries Katherine, he can pretend they have an arranged marriage. A marriage arranged by the accident. Or, you could say,
by God
, who never really let anything happen by accident, right?

Right. This is a solid, happy thought to swallow: a marriage arranged by God.

The restaurant to which Carter and Katherine go for dinner is called Mr. Ribs. Hunter green and burgundy decor. Booths with high backs that ensure privacy. A place suggested by M.B.

Blinded by the restaurant's mood lighting and his extreme self-consciousness, Carter stumbles after the hostess and Katherine.
I did this to her.
He wants to confess to the pretty young hostess:
I did this to her!
But he also understands that a good part of his urge toward confession springs from some rotten longing to deny Katherine as his choice of dinner date.

“You want the ribs?” he asks after the hostess departs.

Katherine peeks out from behind the corner of the grand and glossy menu. She swallows the bite of muffin in her mouth, then says, “M.B. tol' me fry chick-en. 'Cause”—she makes a little face, then twiddles her fingers in front of her—“I not so goo-d wit fork.”

Carter nods. A buttery crumb of muffin speckles Katherine's cheek, and the sight of it there—though it is just a crumb, and, damn it, any woman eating a muffin might have a crumb on her cheek—the sight of it makes Carter queasy.

Does he only imagine the stares of the couple in the booth opposite?
Custodian.
That is the message Carter finds himself trying to project.
Caretaker. Kindly social worker.

When he catches himself at this, however, he feels ashamed, and he reaches across the table and lays his hand on Katherine's.

Does Katherine remember whether or not she has ever been to Washington? No, and Carter fills a large part of the meal with talk of Fort Powden: the deer that graze in the meadows near the bunkers where he used to play war as a kid, the marion berries, the perfect skipping stones that come in along the Sound.

Katherine looks out the window while he talks. She is quite solidly inside her own thoughts, just then. Her open eyes merely hold her place in the ongoing world—they are a thumb stuck in a book in which she has temporarily lost interest. Sometimes, she forgets Carter altogether, despite the pleasant heft of his big hand on hers.

Halfway through dinner, she looks up to say, “On the cliffs, we ki-
ds
play Cas-ro. Cas-tro. He chase-d us. Once, a girl fell. On a cliffs. Deb-bie Mil-ler. Her mom put . . .” Katherine makes wide eyes, then raises her hands to imitate stitching motions. “In 'er head.” She pauses, as if deciding whether to say more, then scoots out of the booth and murmurs an urgent, “I nee' go to bafroom! You hel' me!”