Let the Great World Spin (44 page)

We rush, him and I. We make love again. Afterwards, he showers in my bathroom.

“Tell me something magnificent, Corrigan.”

“Like what?”

“Come on, it’s your turn.”

“Well, I just learned to play the piano.”

“There’s no piano.”

“Exactly. I just sat down at it and could immediately play every note.”

“Ha!”

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It’s true. That is how it feels. I go into the bathroom where he is showering, pull back the curtain, kiss his wet lips, then pull on my robe and go out to look after the children. My bare feet on the curling linoleum floor.

My painted toes. I’m vaguely aware that every fiber in me is still making love to Corrigan. Everything feels new, the tips of my fingers alive to every touch, a stove top.

He comes out of the room with his hair so wet that at first I think the gray at the side temples has disappeared. He is wearing his dark trousers and his black shirt since he has nothing else to change into. He has shaved.

I want to tell him off for using my razor. His skin looks shiny and raw.

A week later—after the accident—I will come home and tap out his hairs at the side of my sink, arrange them in patterns, obsessively, over and over. I will count them out to reconstitute them. I will gather them against the side of the sink and try to create his portrait there.

I saw the X- rays in the hospital. The swollen heart- shadow from the blunt chest trauma. His heart muscle getting squeezed by the blood and fluid. The jugular veins, massively enlarged. His heart went in and out of gallop. The doctor stuck a needle into his chest. I knew the routine from my years as a nurse: drain the pericardium. The blood and fluid were taken out, but Corrigan’s heart kept on swelling. His brother was saying prayers, over and over. They took another X- ray. The jugular veins were massive, they were squeezing him shut. His whole body had gone cold.

But, for now, the children just look up and say: “Hi, Corrie,” as if it is the most natural thing in the world. Behind them, the television plays.

Count to seven. Sing along with me. When the pie was opened the birds began
to sing.

“Nin

˜os, apaguen la tele.”

“Later, Mom.”

Corrigan sits at the small wooden table at the rear of the television set.

He has his back to me. My heart shudders every time he sits near the portrait of my dead husband. He has never asked me to move the photo. He never will. He knows the reason it is there. No matter that my husband was a brute who died in the war in the mountains near Quezaltenango—

it makes no difference—all children need a father. Besides, it is just a photo. It takes no precedence. It does not threaten Corrigan. He knows my story. It is contained within this moment.

And I suddenly think, as I look across the table at him, that these are McCa_9781400063734_4p_04_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:39 PM Page 281

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the days as they will be. This is the future as we see it. The swerve and the static. The confidence and the doubt. Corrigan glances back at me, smiles. He fingers one of my medical textbooks. He even opens it to a random page and scans it, but I know he isn’t reading at all. Sketches of bodies, of bones, of cartilage.

He skips through the pages as if looking for more space.

“Really,” he says, “that’d be a good idea.”

“What?”

“To get a piano and learn how to play it.”

“Yes, and put it where?”

“On top of the television set. Right, Jacobo? Hey, Bo, that would work, wouldn’t i t?”

“Nah,” says Jacobo.

Corrigan leans across the sofa and knuckles my son’s dark hair.

“Maybe we’ll get a piano with a television set inside it.”

“Nah.”

“Maybe we’ll get a piano and TV and a chocolate machine all in one.”

“Nah.”

“Television,” says Corrigan, smiling, “the perfect drug.”

For the first time in years I wish for a garden. We could go outside in the cool fresh air and sit away from the children, find our own space, shorten the nearby buildings into blades of grass, have the stonemasons carve flowers at our feet. I have often dreamed of bringing him back to Guatemala. There was a place my childhood friends and I used to go, a butterfly grove, down the dirt road towards Zacapa. The path dipped through the bushes. The trees opened into the grove, where the bushes grew low. The flowers were in the shape of a bell, red and plentiful. The girls sucked on the sweet flowers while the boys tore the butterflies apart to see how they were made. Some of the wings were so colorful they could only be poisonous. When I left my home and arrived in New York, I rented a small apartment in Queens, and, one day, distraught, I got a tattoo on my ankle, the wings spread wide. It is one of the stupidest things I have ever done. I hated myself for the cheapness I had become.

“You’re daydreaming,” Corrigan says to me.

“Am I?”

My head against his shoulder, he laughs as if the laughter wants to travel a good distance, down through my body also.

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“Corrie?”

“ Uh- huh?”

“You like my tattoo?”

He prods me playfully. “I can live with it,” he says.

“Tell me the truth.”

“No, I like it, I do.”

“Mentiroso,” I say. He creases his forehead. “Fibber.”

“I’m not fibbing. Kids! Kids, do you think I’m fibbing?”

Neither of them says a word.

“See?” says Corrigan. “I told you.”

My desire for him now is raw and sharp. I lean forward and kiss his lips. It is the first time we have kissed in front of the children, but they do not seem to notice. A sliver of cold at my neck.

There are times—though not often—when I wish that I didn’t have children at all. Just make them disappear, God, for an hour or so, no more, just an hour, that’s all. Just do it quickly and out of my sight, have them go up in a puff of smoke and be gone, then bring them back fully intact, as if they didn’t leave at all. But just let me be alone, with him, this man, Corrigan, for a tiny while, just me and him, together.

I leave my head on his shoulder. He touches the side of my face absently. What can be on his mind? There are so many things to pull him away from me. Sometimes, I feel he is made of a magnet. He bounces and spins in midair around me. I go to the kitchen and make him café.

He likes it very strong and hot with three spoonfuls of sugar. He lifts the spoon out and licks it triumphantly, as if the spoon has gotten him through an ordeal. He breathes on the spoon and then hangs it off the end of his nose, so it dangles there, absurdly.

He turns to me. “What do you think, Adie?”

“Que payaso.”

“Gracias,” he says in his awful accent.

He walks over in front of the television set with the spoon still hanging off the end of his nose. It falls and he catches it and then he breathes on it once more, does his trick. The children explode in laughter. “Let me, let me, let me.”

These are the little things I am learning. He is ridiculous enough to hang spoons off the end of his nose. This, and he likes to blow his café McCa_9781400063734_4p_04_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:39 PM Page 283

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cool, three short blows, one long blow. This, and he has no taste for cereal. This, and that he’s good at fixing toasters.

The children return to the television show. He sits back and finishes his café. He stares at the far wall. I know he is thinking again of his God and his church and his loss if he decides to leave the Order. It is like his own shadow has leaped up to get him. I know all this because he smiles at me and it is a smile that contains everything, including a shrug, and then he suddenly gets up from the table, stretches, goes to the couch and falls over the back of it, sits between the children, as if they can protect him. He drapes his arms around them, over their shoulders. I like him and dislike him for this, both at once. I feel a desire for him again, in my mouth now, sharp like salt.

“You know,” he says, “I’ve work to do.”

“Don’t go, Corrie. Just hang around awhile. Work can wait.”

“Yeah,” he says, as if he might believe it.

He pulls the children closer to him and they allow it. I want him to make up his mind. I want to hear him say that he can have both God and me, also my children and my little clapboard house. I want him to remain here—exactly here—on the couch, without moving.

I will always wonder what it was, what that moment of beauty was, when he whispered it to me, when we found him smashed up in the hospital, what it was he was saying when he whispered into the dark that he had seen something he could not forget, a jumble of words, a man, a building, I could not quite make it out. I can only hope that in the last minute he was at peace. It might have been an ordinary thought, or it might have been that he had made up his mind that he would leave the Order, and that nothing would stop him now, and he would come home to me, or maybe it was nothing at all, just a simple moment of beauty, a little thing hardly worth talking about, a random meeting, or a word he had with Jazzlyn or Tillie, a joke, or maybe he had decided that, yes, he could lose me now, that he could stay with his church and do his work, or maybe there was nothing on his mind at all, perhaps he was just happy, or in agony, and the morphine had scattered him—there are all these things and there are more—it is impossible to know. I hold in confusion the last moments of his language.

There was a man walked the air, I heard about that. And Corrigan had McCa_9781400063734_4p_04_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:39 PM Page 284

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spent the night sleeping in his van down near the courthouse. He got a ticket for it. On John Street. Perhaps he woke up, stumbled out of his van in the early morning, and saw the man high up there, challenging God, a man above the cross rather than below—who knows, I cannot tell. Or maybe it was the court case, that the walker got off free, while Tillie was sent away for eight months, maybe that annoyed him—these things are tangled, there are no answers, maybe he thought she deserved another chance, he was angry, she shouldn’t have gone to jail. Or maybe something else got to him.

He told me once that there was no better faith than a wounded faith and sometimes I wonder if that is what he was doing all along—trying to wound his faith in order to test it—and I was just another stone in the way of his God.

In my worst moments I am convinced that he was rushing home to say good- bye, that he was driving too fast because he made up his mind, and it was finished, but in my best, my very best, he comes up on the doorstep, smiling, with his arms spread wide, in order to stay.

And so this is how I will leave him as much, and as often, as I can. It was—it is—a Thursday morning a week before the crash, and it fits in the space of every other morning I wake into. He sits between Eliana and Jacobo, on the couch, his arms spread wide, the buttons of his black shirt open, his gaze fixed forward. Nothing will ever really take him from the couch. It is just a simple brown thing, with mismatching cushions, and a hole in the armrest where it has been worn through, a few coins from his pocket fallen down into the gaps, and I will take it with me now wherever I go, to Zacapa, or the nursing home, or any other place I happen to find.

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I knew almost right off. Them two babies needed looking after. It was a deep- down feeling that must’ve come from long ago. Sometimes thinking back on things is a mistake arising out of pride, but I guess you live inside a moment for years, move with it and feel it grow, and it sends out roots until it touches everything in sight.

I grew up in southern Missouri. The only girl with five brothers. It was the years of the Great Depression. Things were falling apart, but we held together as best we could. The house we lived in was a small A- frame, like most houses on the colored side of town. The unpainted timbers sagged around the porch. On one side of the house was the long parlor, furnished with cane chairs, a purple divan, and a long table, rough- hewn from the bed of a broken cart. Two large oak trees shaded the other side of the house, where the bedrooms were built to face east into sunrise. I hung buttons and nails from the branches, a wind chime.

Inside, the floors of the house were unevenly spaced. At night, raindrops fell on the metal roof.

My father used to say he liked to sit back and listen to the whole place make noise.

The days I recall finest were about as ordinary as they come—playing hopscotch on the slab of broken concrete, following my brothers through McCa_9781400063734_4p_04_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:39 PM Page 286

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the cornfields, trailing my schoolbag through the dust. My older brothers and I read a lot of books back then—a bookmobile came around our street once every few months, staying fifteen minutes. When the sun bubbled yellow on the broken fence we ran out from the house, down towards the back of Chaucer’s grocery store, to play in a stream that strikes me now as paltry, but back then was a waterway to contend with. We’d sail steamships down that mighty creek, and we’d have Nigger Jim whopping on Tom Sawyer for all he was worth. Huck Finn was not one we knew quite what to do with, and we mostly left him out of our adventures. The paper boats went around the corner and away.

My father was a house painter most of the time, but the thing he loved to do was hand- paint signs on the doorways of businesses in town. The names of important men on frosted glass. Gold- leaf lettering and careful silver curlicues. He got occasional work with the trading companies, the mills, and the small- town detective agencies. Every now and then a museum or an evangelical church wanted its welcome signs touched up. His business was nearly all in the white part of town, but when he worked on our side of the river we would go along with him and hold his ladder, hand him brushes and cloths. He painted wooden signs that swung in the wind for real estate and riverbed clams and sandwiches that cost a nickel. He was a short man who dressed impeccably for every job, no matter where it was. He wore a creased shirt with a starched collar and a silver tie pin. His trousers were cuffed at the bottom and he was happy to say that if he looked hard enough he could see the reflection of his work in his shoes. He never mentioned a single thing to us about money, or the lack of it, and when the Depression really kicked in, he simply went around to all of his old jobs and touched up the paint in the hope that the business would stay alive, and they might slip him a dollar or two when times were good.