If a Stranger Approaches You: Stories (18 page)

Still, it had only been, it seemed to Chloe, about a
week
since she’d grown used to this—all of this, her whole life, her strange decisions, like the decisions of a stranger—and accepted it, herself, and what she’d done.

Was that
possible
, to feel the passage of time so differently than the clocks and calendars registered it—or was that, as she suspected, some sort of distortion, like the little warning stenciled onto the bottom of the rearview mirror? Looking backward, she only
thought
that what she was seeing was the way things back there actually looked. Those things were smaller, distorted by hindsight, forever lost to actual understanding and analysis. Certainly, surely, Chloe could not honestly have named the date, pin-pointed the very moment, of her acceptance of
everything
after eight years of vicissitude and guilt?

No.

Yes.

Truly.

It
was
true. Chloe had recognized it even as it was happening: She was standing in the kitchen, pouring coffee into a cup, and Jay was pulling the front door closed behind him, brightly and casually telling her to have a good day.

“Be careful driving!” she’d called out to him.

It would have been less than a hundred and twenty seconds later that he was scooping the bloodied child up in his arms, running.

“I hope this is hell,” the man in line ahead of her says, “because if there’s something worse waiting for me, I don’t think I can stand it.”

Chloe would have pretended to chuckle if she could. She knows there’s no point in the rage she feels, the impulse to tell the man in front of her in the check-out line what
hell
might really feel like, that
hell
might be a party in your backyard the week after your husband in his pickup truck has struck a child on a bicycle, two days after that
child has been taken off life support—a party you’d thrown every year for the last seven years and which everyone insisted you should throw again this year, for your husband’s sake, and which you’d foolishly, until this very moment, believed they were right about. A party for which guests would begin to arrive in about an hour, and you hadn’t even wiped off the picnic table yet or set out the lawn chairs.

This man. In addition to that one time in the high school hallway, Chloe thinks she might remember having seen him once or twice at the post office. (He’d been grumbling there, too. But everyone had. A line clear out the door that time.) There’s something about his face that makes Chloe think of Jesus, if he’d gotten to be about fifty years old. The eyes are dark and full of suffering, but he also looks too intelligent to put up with too much more bullshit from this world, unlike Christ. He needs a shave. He is, she realizes, a very attractive man.

She looks into her cart:

She’s got the beer, the crackers, the Cracker Barrel cheese spread. The salami and rye bread. The chips and pretzels. The French onion dip.

But there were other things she should have gotten, should have prepared. Things she put out every year. Things her guests might have grown to expect. The meatballs. The fruit salad. But Chloe has neither the time, now, nor the heart to cut radishes into flowerets. Surely, they’d understand. The guests who hadn’t already heard the news would find out fast from the whisperings behind the garage, and from the zombie-mask on her husband’s face—a gray, damp-plaster thing he went to bed with every night now, woke up with, wore all day.

“Fuck. Fuck!” Jay had shouted after he hung up the phone.

He was standing at the edge of the bed in his boxer shorts, holding the phone in one hand and pounding his naked chest hard with the other.

Chloe had been lost in a dream in which she was making love with her boyfriend from college. The smell and the taste of it was
exactly as it had been. Twenty-five years ago in a dorm room in a single bed. Joni Mitchell singing on the stereo.

And then the phone had rung.

The child had died after two days hooked up to machines, and a prayer vigil. They were donating the organs. No one blamed Jay. Her husband’s fist left a bright red circle on his chest where he hit it. He hit it again.

“So what’s your holiday look like?” the man ahead of her in line asks, looking at the beer and festive junk food in her cart.

Chloe’s mouth opens, and she tries to form a word, but has no idea what the word would be. She swallows, still with her mouth open, and the man’s face changes. It must look to him like she is about to cry. He says, “Are you all right?”

She shakes her head. She takes a step backward, pulling her cart with her as she goes, and the line behind her buckles, it seems, like some kind of human bridge—some grumbling, some sighing, an annoyed intake of breath. Perhaps they are envious, or pitying, or disdainful to see that Chloe is leaving the line for good, doing the unthinkable, absenting herself from the line she has been standing in for such a long time, finally even abandoning her cart, walking backward as she watches the man ahead of her recede with a concerned look on his face before he, too, steps out of the line and follows Chloe with his arms full of chips, which he dumps into her abandoned cart before taking her arm, guiding her out of the store and into the parking lot, to his car, leaving the cart and the line and the chips behind them for all of eternity.

I
mpossible that Greta would be the first to learn this secret, this subtlety, this skill, whatever you wanted to call it. And to learn it so simply, so much like learning a first language. Like water pouring into a glass until it was almost full. That there weren’t others who could also do this seemed so unlikely, but she’d never heard anyone speak of it, and never would. Not a word on the subject in the library. Not a single helpful Google hit.

It was so easy. All she’d had to do was stare at it—and even from a distance of twenty feet, and through the windshield of her stepmother’s car, which separated herself from the suffering pigeon while her stepmother was in the grocery store, shopping for something for dinner.

(“Want anything?” “No.”)

All she’d done was watch it and whisper under her breath, precisely four times,
Please die, Please die, Please die, Please die.

And all at once it had stopped its pitiful, heartbreaking hopping, its scrambling effort to get away from the parking lot that had killed it (some bitch in an SUV, who hadn’t even slowed down) and to get back to something like nature. Grass. Tree. Nest. Wondering horribly what had happened to it, and what might happen next, while realizing that getting back would be impossible now. It would be like trying
to go back in time. Before the affair. Before the divorce. Before her father remarried the mistress. Before they’d moved to this awful town so far from her real mother. To get back to the time when he’d called her mother his Morning Glory, and her his Baby Dumpling-Daisy.

That world was gone.

She had watched the whole thing happen. The pigeon in a swooping flight, heading for some scrap of bread near the wheel of a parked car, and the speeding SUV, and even with the windows rolled up Greta had heard the smack and witnessed the broken way the bird fell out of the air to the ground.

And then the struggle, the hopeless situation, the curb, too far away, and that SUV making a left turn out of the grocery store parking lot as if nothing had happened at all.

Greta’s stepmother made a face when she came out of the store and saw the dead pigeon on the pavement, and veered her shopping cart far around it. She took a long time putting the paper bags in the trunk, and when she plopped back down into the driver’s seat she said to Greta, wearily, “Is anything wrong?”

“No,” Greta said, never mentioning the pigeon, which her stepmother also never mentioned, even when they passed within a few feet of it while driving out of the parking lot, and Greta looked out at it, hard:

A wad of pale purple feathers now. No blood. One beady eye—the only eye Greta could see—open. A damp, dark peace was in that, she thought, and thought of her father’s face the day she rode a bicycle toward him without training wheels for the first time. … “You got it, girl!” he’d shouted. He was sweaty and red-faced and out of breath, as if he were the one who’d been peddling unsteadily down the sidewalk toward himself, as if there were something like riding a bicycle in watching a child ride one.

On the pavement, looking up with that one eye, the pigeon seemed to be looking up at its own self flying away from itself.

“So, are we going to ride along in stony silence, Greta? Maybe I should turn the radio on?”

Greta shrugged a shoulder, and continued to stare out the window long after the pigeon was long gone.

The rest of Greta’s childhood wound through a kind of thicket, and she emerged from it wearing a blindfold that someone had tied around her face that day in the grocery store parking lot. Some witch, some devil, some fairy godmother or guardian angel had tied it behind her head and whispered,
Don’t take it off, whatever you do.
And she never had, although she’d spent all those years knowing that she could.

It had tortured her and sustained her. This secret, supernatural power. This skill. She’d look at the side of her stepmother’s face beside her in the car for a few terrifying seconds, and then look away, vowing never to look at the woman that closely, ever again, and she never did.

She did her homework and cleared the table after dinner. She took the garbage out on Fridays. She introduced her stepmother to her classmates and boyfriends at college, sent her cards on Mother’s Day, thanked her for every meal she ever made, and held her in her arms on the day of her father’s funeral as her stepmother sobbed and sobbed as if she were the little girl who had lost her father.

Greta watched her own children crawl into her stepmother’s lap and call her Grandma. She helped the old woman fold her laundry. She drove her to the grocery store on Sundays.

And, all the time, Greta knew what she knew about the skill she had and would not use until finally one day there was a tube in her stepmother’s throat. One eye was dead, and one was fixed on Greta—the parched lips opening and closing, the spotted skin, the limbs all turned into themselves like the branches of a terrible tree, and Greta kissed her stepmother’s forehead then, took a step back, taking her in, before she said it four times under her breath, and then listened. Some radiant wind swirling around the dead woman. Some sound of grateful bliss.

O
nce there was a woman who was asked by a stranger to carry a foreign object with her onto a plane. When the stranger approached her, the woman was sitting at the edge of her chair a few feet from the gate out of which her plane was scheduled to leave. Her legs were crossed. She was wearing a black turtleneck and slim black pants. Black boots. Pearl studs in her ears. She was swinging the loose leg, the one that was tossed over the knee of the other—swinging it slowly and rhythmically, like a pendulum, as she tried to drink her latte in burning sips.

By the time the stranger approached her and asked her to carry the foreign object with her onto the plane, the woman had already owned that latte for at least twenty minutes, but it hadn’t cooled a single degree. It was as if there were a thermonuclear process at work inside her cup—the steamed milk and espresso somehow generating together their own heat—and the tip of her tongue had been stung numb from trying to drink it, and the plastic nipple of the cup’s white lid was smeared with her lipstick.

Her name was Kathy Bliss. She was anxious. At home, her two-year-old was sick, but she’d had to go to Maine anyway because she’d been asked to speak on behalf of the nonprofit for which she worked, and possibly thousands upon thousands of dollars would be
gifted to it by her hosts if she were able to conjure the right combination of passion and desperation with which she was sometimes able to speak on behalf of her nonprofit. She didn’t much believe in what they were doing, which was, to her mind, mostly justifying the spending of their donations on computers and letterheads and lunches with donors, but she had her eye on another nonprofit, one devoted to curing a disease (or at least
publicizing
a disease) which no one knew about until it was contracted, at which time the body attacked itself, turning the skin into a suit of armor, petrifying the internal organs one by one. The vice president of this nonprofit had his eye on the regional directorship of the American Cancer Society, she knew, and with some luck his position would be open, and she would be ready to move into it.