Refund (2 page)

He began to shoot. She touched her thighs and arms and realized, with surprise, how deeply she loved her body. A wineglass exploded on the floor beside her foot. She cried out and pressed her face into the musty carpet. She saw Warren Vance hunched under a table. The flat carpet bristled against her face.

The bullets were still coming. When would they stop? The wounded cried out for help. Others crawled away, like animals, in their finery. Some bent to help others, and some fled; Anna's mind was gray, static, and she did not know where to go. She saw Warren crawl up from under the table, and he caught her gaze. His head nodded toward a side door. There was a way out. He turned and stumbled down the hallway, and she scrambled up, kicked off her maroon fake-suede heels, and ran after him. She rushed down a bare beige corridor, the linoleum cold on her bare feet, past the hotel kitchen, the oddly domestic sounds of pans clattering and water rushing into a sink; she ran, the sound of screams fading behind her, pushing through the side doors into the parking lot, and she kept going until
she got to the edge of it and then stood there, in the black night. Below her, traffic streamed down on the highway. The light glowed, a pale mist, off the speeding cars.

Sirens sounded. Emergency personnel leapt out of red trucks. Her clothes held the odor of champagne and smoke, of a celebration, not a crime. She walked to her car, past the sign in the parking lot:
GO OTTERS! WELCOME CLASS OF '84
. Her classmates stumbled out of the hotel, clutching key rings imprinted with photos of themselves as young people; they stood around weeping or fled into the night. She did not realize she was trembling until her hand could not fit the key through the lock in the car. The night air was light and cool on her arms. She looked around for Warren Vance. She wanted, urgently, to run to him, to kiss him, to thank him for showing her the right door. She walked slowly around the parking lot, looking, but he was gone.

S
HE DROVE HOME, TWO HOURS DEEP INTO THE
I
NLAND
E
MPIRE
where she lived. Her family resided in a community splashed onto an area that should have remained desert—pale stucco houses pushed aside rattlesnakes and coyotes, and the newly made streets burned with a glaring heat. It was late, and on the freeway she passed a man shaving in his car with his interior lights on, a pickup truck full of drunken teenagers, a driver of an oil rig listening to Italian opera. Everyone drove with a giddy foolishness, obeying the traffic rules. She had to think carefully to remember to grip the steering wheel, to press the gas. Was she, in fact, alive? How did she know? Had she, in fact, been hit by a bullet, and was she now dying on her way home? Then she realized she could not be shot because they could not afford to fix her. She pressed the hard, ridged pedals with her bare feet. The dampness of the vinyl steering wheel came off on her hands.

It was almost midnight when she returned. She opened the door quietly and crept upstairs. Everyone was awake. She heard the monotone voice of her husband reading to the children. For a moment, unnoticed, she watched. Her husband appeared to be reading nursery rhymes to the stale air. The girl, who was just two, was wearing a pink ball gown, and her face was smeared with red lollipop. She was climbing to the top of her brother's bunk bed and diving off it into a single pillow. The boy had emptied hundreds of cards he was collecting—Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, baseball and football heroes, idolatry of all persuasions—into the middle of his room and was organizing them feverishly. The children were so tired they looked drunk.

Her husband's family had divorced bitterly when he was seven, leaving him to be raised by his grandmother, and he had become a social worker, to help others with their sorrow. She and Howard had met when she installed a dryer for him, and he had, like the others, asked for her ID. “Anna,” he read, matter-of-factly; she had not realized until then that the suspicion of her customers caused her pain. She would stand at the door, and the homeowner would look at her, as though she were wearing a costume of a repairperson and that she could not do what she did, and a part of her enjoyed tricking them, seeing their expressions turn from concern to relief. But with Howard, there was no suspicion. He told her about his clients, who were struggling with prison and bankruptcy and child care and runaway teenagers; she listened to how he helped them with small steps: getting a driver's license, a new apartment, an order of restraint. Sometimes these steps moved his clients along, sometimes they did not, but she loved the way he looked into the chaos and tried, with a form or a phone call, to find a way out.

They were married; one child came into their home, then another. The children sat in their pink and blue onesies, smiling,
toothless, but she was aware that the hats with the puppy ears, the outfits decorated with trains and cats and roses were useful in distracting parents from noticing the darkness; from the breathless, gasping love the children elicited and that made the parents sit up in the middle of the night, listening. They were always listening; there was always a simmering fear.

S
O HERE THEY WERE, IN THEIR LATE THIRTIES, PERPLEXED BUT TRYING
to get on with it, and recently, the girl had developed a problem going to sleep. It seemed sparked by nothing: the sight of a witch on a video, an awareness of the end of herself as a baby. She now refused to go to sleep at night. She rejected all offerings of comfort—toys, juice, songs—and stood in the dark light, screaming.

“We have to just let her cry,” she had told him one night.

“How?” he said to her, to anyone who advised him to do this. “It's how she tells us how she feels.” Recently, he had turned thirty-nine, the age his parents had been when they divorced. Now, every night, he crawled into the little girl's bedroom. He lay on the carpet while the girl fell asleep in her bed. For months, Anna had woken alone in their bed to find him curled up on the carpet of their daughter's room; he said he wanted the child to wake up to his face, as though to the sun.

But it was ruining him. He staggered up at dawn and sat at the kitchen table; when he left the house one morning, he drove the car into a tree. Then he began loaning money to his clients, for groceries, for textbooks. He waited for them to pay him. They waited. The girl stood in her crib and screamed.

Now it was 11:45
PM
, and she watched them; she wanted to rush in and gather them in her arms and feel the sweet thrum of their bodies—but she could not. She was afraid something inside her might crack apart, and her weeping would frighten them. She stood, instead, silent, dim, in the hallway, trying to remember that she was real.

Then she stepped into the room.

“They're still up?” she asked.

The girl looked at her and shrieked with joy. The boy jumped up. “Did you get me a toy?” he whispered, seductively, into her ear.

“Oh,” said her husband. “I thought you were staying for the whole thing—”

“Something happened,” she said.

“She took my Harpie Lady card!” yelled the boy.

“She didn't take it,” said her husband tiredly. “She found it.”

“She stole it!” yelled the boy.

“Welcome home,” said her husband. He looked like he had endured a brawl. “Good night.” He stood up, zoomed into the bedroom, and collapsed onto their bed.

“Daddy, no!” screamed the girl.

“Please, God,” he muttered, hoarsely, into the bedsheets.

Anna lifted the kicking girl into her crib. “Time for bed.”

“Daddy, help me!” screamed the girl. “Help!”

Her rage was awesome, tremendous. Anna closed the windows so the neighbors would not hear her screams. Anna touched her hair, softly. She did not know what to say to the child. “Please,” she pleaded with her child. “For God's sake, please.” The girl glared at her mother until her father crawled in and stretched out on the carpet. In all of the lit homes, were parents making similar pleas of their children?

“You also need to sleep,” she said to her husband.

“No,” he said. “Sophie, I'm here.” The girl stood in her ball gown, clutching the bars of her crib, beaming.

The boy was hurling the girl's stuffed animals at the wall. “Look what she did!” he yelled. He opened his fist. There was a tiny shred of crumpled card in it. “Look!”

She smoothed his hair and guided him to his bed. “I'm sorry,” she said.

“Get me more for my birthday,” he begged. “I want to get fifty. Sixty. Please!” He rolled over and fell asleep.

S
HE LAY AWAKE IN THE DARK WHILE THE OTHERS FELL INTO THEIR
dreams. Was it strange that Johnny the Weatherman had begun to shoot? Or was it stranger that Tyra Johnson, a beauty, had gained one hundred pounds and moved to Modesto, or that Brian Horwitz, the class clown, was president of his synagogue, or that Laurie Stone, who had held her hand tenderly as they walked into kindergarten, had been indicted for embezzlement at a local bank? She looked out the window, and all she saw was determined innocence—the bullish SUVs parked in the driveways, testament to dreams of safety, of endless oil; she looked at the houses of her neighbors, flocking here, to the edge of the desert, the only place they could afford in Southern California; she saw the development vanishing violently in a wild-fire, in a terrorist attack. Her own childhood home in Granada Hills was bulldozed for a luxury condo complex, her parents retired, taking medicine for their hearts, her father a math teacher now bagging groceries at Ralph's for extra money, both of them praying that Social Security would hold up. The sight of her father, a man of six feet, gentle but bad with money, carefully guiding groceries across the parking lot made her ache with useless love. She could not save him. The houses were slapped together with drywall and paste.

When she finally fell unconscious, she dreamed of Warren Vance. She dreamed that Warren bragged that he spent $800,000 on a day trip to the moon. She saw him standing on the moon's white surface in his cheap suit, smoke trailing off the end of his cigarette. “Vance wants you,” he said, and he pulled her toward him.

H
ER HUSBAND WOKE FIRST AND WENT DOWN TO MAKE BREAKFAST
; Anna hurried to the front lawn and grabbed that day's paper. The
shooting had made the front page; eight classmates had been injured in the shooting, two were dead. Her throat felt cold as she read about the dead: Tiffany Mann, Harry Waters. She had just glimpsed them in the ballroom. Their high school faces smiled from the front page.

Her husband was standing in front of the stove making breakfast. The hearty smell of bacon filled the air.

“Read this,” she said, handing it to him.

He glanced at the newspaper. The pale desert light poured through the windows, as though shoveled from a mine of diamonds. Her husband looked up at her quickly.

“Two dead,” she said. “People were injured—”

He looked at the paper and then at her and then lifted strips of bacon from the grease to a paper towel. His hand trembled.

“Are you okay?”

“I think so.”

“What did you do?”

“I hid under a chair.”

He blinked.

“Did you think of throwing something at him?”

“He had a gun,” she said.

He looked dissatisfied. “Did anyone try?”

“We were afraid,” she said.

“My God,” he said. He clutched the handle of the pan, trying to will all of them into an ordinary domestic scenario. Then he stepped forward and hugged her. They clung to each other, their hands grasping but awkward, as if touching these bodies for the first time. The girl hurled her bacon to the floor.

“Hot!” she announced.

“Don't throw your bacon!” shouted the boy, joyfully. He slapped her arm. The girl shrieked and whacked him with her spoon.

“Stop, everyone!” Anna said, pulling them away from each other. The girl threw the spoon across the room, where it hit the monthly calendar; it slid down. “Stop now!”

“Have more,” said her husband, piling more bacon onto their plates.

The sun made the children's hair gleam. She felt the boy's arm twitch, slow. The children resumed their breakfast. Her husband looked at her; he wanted to ask more.

“Was there blood?” he asked.

It was not what she had expected him to ask.

“There was,” she said, and they waited for this to answer something. They were all balanced, barely, on the fragile sheath of linoleum.

“More bacon!” yelled the boy. “Now.”

S
HE HAD FOUR APPOINTMENTS THAT DAY, AND SHE STRAPPED HERSELF
in the car and set off. Her car joined the flood of others on their daily missions. Anna knocked on doors, looked at circuit boards, listened for unusual noises; tightened, aligned, cleaned, lubricated parts; brought out her RF leakage detector, her thermistor vacuum gauge, her hex wrenches; she turned machines on. She lingered in homeowners' kitchens, chatting with them about warranties, prices, but really, she was looking around. There was the precise cleanliness of the floors, the proliferation or absence of family photos. She pretended to be checking a dryer to make sure it was running, but she was listening to the way the customers talked to people on the phone while she worked; she needed to compare the tenor of their fear to her own. They all were afraid of something, big or small—the shoddy work of a contractor or being too shy to wear a certain dress, or the results of a biopsy or a child's bad grade on a test or the thought that the cat had spoken or the weird sound the refrigerator was making. And on and on.