That Night (18 page)

She ordered coffee simply to seem older and then apple pie, although she would have preferred chocolate cake, for the same reason.

“Your mom going to pick you up?” the waitress asked.

Sheryl shook her head. “No. I’m supposed to meet her down the road. At the gas station. Our car broke down and she had to take it there to get it fixed.”

The waitress frowned a little, and Sheryl added, as she had rehearsed, “She doesn’t know anything about cars. She’s a widow.”

The woman threw back her head. “Tell her to learn,” she said. “I’m a widow, too, and not three weeks after my husband died some mechanic took me for a hundred dollars. Tell your mom to take an adult ed course or something. Where you from?”

“Ohio,” Sheryl said. “Columbus.”

“Tell your mom to see if they have a course at your high school. I know. It’s tough when you’re alone.”

Two more teenagers came in and the waitress went to them. When Sheryl stood to leave, she felt the eyes of the faceless cook follow her to the register. The waitress took her money and gave her her change.

“Night now,” she said, looking at her carefully.

Sheryl said, “Good night.”

A small decal on the door said the place closed at ten.

She returned to the road, continued walking. She had thought she might simply walk all night, but the blister on her heel was sharply painful—she paused to wedge a tissue between it and the back of her shoe, but it didn’t help-and the road was so black she occasionally missed her step, thinking the earth rose where it did not or failing to see where it fell. There was a thin moon skimming the trees, gray and marbled like a worn shell. She turned and walked back to the diner.

Behind the parking lot were the remains of a rotting stockade fence. It was surrounded by high grass, and as soon as she made her way around it, she could hear the shrill drone of a mosquito in her ear, but there was a safety in it. She sank down in the grass, her back to the damp wood. The stars above the trees looked pale green. The moon rose higher. She listened to the cars coming and going over the dirt, the footsteps and the voices, simply waiting. She never thought that tomorrow she would be back home, with Rick, all returned to what it had been. She settled instead for a smaller return, to a place where she had rested and had something to eat. She would simply be grateful to see the sun once more, the night over. A day like the last beginning again.

There was a good half hour of silence, broken only by the sound of the cars passing on the road out front. And then she heard what she recognized as the waitress’s voice as she laughed and said, “No kidding.” Sheryl leaned over to peer around the bit offence. She saw the waitress in her white uniform and the cook in his white pants and T-shirt descend the steps that led from the kitchen. At the bottom, they embraced for a long time, formed in their white clothes one shapeless image in the pale moonlight, then separated and walked in opposite directions toward their cars.

Sheryl listened to both engines as they started, saw both sets of headlights come on. They were gone a good while before she could shake off her sadness and stand. She limped across the lot to the restaurant, climbed the stairs and half heartedly tried the back door. Then she sat on the concrete steps. She rested her pocketbook on her lap, folded her arms across it, her elbows in her palms. She leaned against the shingles that covered the cinderblock wall. His bracelet was black in the shade of her arm. She closed her eyes and willed herself to dream of him, but the night grew damp and chilly and her sleep was shallow. Twice she heard the metal clatter of a garbage-can cover, the skitter of tiny feet on the gravel. Even in her half sleep, she was aware of the slow pace of the night and the slow, reluctant way it was lifted.

When she woke for the last time, the air was gray and there was a pale mist through the trees at the edge of the lot, mist draped like ragged bits of cloth over a black line of distant hills.

It was not logical for love to come to nothing, but she must have admitted then, for the first time, that it was certainly possible that it could, like grief, grow forgetful and weary and slowly wear away. She would get older. She would love someone else. She could not live her own life, live through all the coming years of school and friends and marriage and a job, live through the birth of this child she carried, without growing forgetful at times, weary of the pledge she had made. She could not both live and continue to keep them alive.

And yet she could not believe that all her love would come to nothing.

When she began walking that morning, she had only a vague idea of her destination, a vague sense of the challenge she was about to propose. She would choose a public place, but one where only a stroke of luck, a miracle of sorts, would save her.

She would either see him again, refusing all her long life, or she would learn something about the vigilance of the dead.

In the days that followed the fight, he was kept in the jail rooms behind the local police headquarters. It was a new building of orange brick, wide and low, much like a small grammar school, and the police who worked there and dealt mostly with hoods and drunks tended to treat all their guests as incorrigible students with after-school detention. They called Rick Lover Boy and said of him, well within his hearing, “He’s seen too many movies.”

He spent his days there lying on his cot, breathing through his mouth.

His nose had been taped with a wide cross of white adhesive and stuffed with cotton, and his already fuzzy vision (the sunglasses were prescriptive and the police had failed to give him the small horn-rimmed pair his sister brought) was further distorted by the swelling and the pain.

That night, when the arresting officers had brought him to the hospital, the emergency-room nurse had pulled his fingers from his face with a provocative, sexual gentleness, all the while cooing softly, as if to a child. Back in the police station, his father had taken his chin between his thumb and forefinger and examined their work. Even half blinded, both by the swelling and the station-house lights, Rick could see the way his father drew his lips together and, with his head back, peered at him from under his lids. It was his doctor’s face. Rick and his sisters used to imitate it—holding out a thumb at arm’s length, squinting at it. “Who am I?” “Daddy!”

His father carefully touched the adhesive and the cardboard splints and then ran his thumb down both sides of Rick’s face, lightly and quickly. In the bright station house, it was as close as he could come to a caress, and in the second it provided him to look into his child’s face he saw his own wild disbelief, lingering still after more time than should have been needed to accommodate it, that anything he had wanted with such passion could so easily slip through his hands.

Rick turned from his father toward the officers who had brought him in.

The father turned from his daughter as she offered him her arm.

In his cell, a small high window let in only a blur of orange sky.

There was a parking lot just outside, he knew, then the police garage, then a road and a supermarket. The sounds he heard that first night, an occasional car passing, an occasional car backfiring, burning rubber, were the same sounds he might have heard from his own bedroom at home. But lights were on all through the corridor, and although he could barely distinguish the source from the reflection, he could see the way the light spread itself over the linoleum beside his bed. It was the kind of light he had seen in the hospital, the loony bin, where his mother stayed. He wondered briefly if now he would be just like her.

There were low voices down the corridor. He heard someone say ninety-eight degrees. There were footsteps and a dry hot whisper that was his own breathing.

That night, he dreamed of public places, parking lots and school corridors, the emergency-room nurse leading him by the fingers he could not take from his face. Nothing of Sheryl, nor of the moment when he saw her mother appear behind the screen and knew for certain she was gone. That none of it was true.

The next morning, he asked the attorney they had sent him if he was as much a lawyer as his father was a doctor, but the man only said, “I certainly hope so,” unsure whether the chin-out, head-back stance was swagger or mere compensation for the two black eyes. “But you’ve got yourself quite a little mess.”

Rick saw a pink, bald face and a wide white shirt front slashed with a startling string of black. The man said, “First tell me what happened, from the beginning,” and as Rick began to speak, reluctantly, and in mumbled half sentences, he felt he had dreamed this too, that he had been in this room, talking like this before.

At one point, the lawyer leaned forward and eyes emerged from what had been two sockets of shadow. And what would he have done, the lawyer asked, his voice puckered with disdain, if she had been there? Elope? Kidnap? Kill her?

Rick shook his head. It occurred to him that he would not be treated this way if he had killed someone.

“Were you planning to hurt her in any way?”

“No,” he said. The man waited, seemed to study him. Rick became aware of the labored sound of his own breathing, the dryness of his mouth. It seemed a great advantage to be able to breathe silently, through your nose.

“What, then? Drag her into your car?”

“No.” Frowning, insulted, but uncertain if he should say, I wouldn’t hurt her, or I’m not that stupid. “It wasn’t even my car.”

“Threaten her? Scare her?”

He said no again, impatiently, trying to get as much expression of disgust into his eyes as he could. “I just wanted to talk to her.”

He heard the man sigh, and his sigh, too, was tainted with dislike. “You drive three cars up onto her lawn,” the lawyer said slowly. “You bring all your friends armed with chains, you nearly break her mother’s neck, just ‘cause you wanted to talk to her? You expect anybody to accept that? You want me to believe that?”

It was the voice, the eyes, the blurred, nearly glossy face of whoever had watched him: that day in the mall, that night in the bowling alley when the bowlers had turned, startled by his cry; the voice, the eyes, of whoever had seen his dream—the baby turned into a pig—who had known the foolish, unaccountable terror it filled him with. Who knew the high feminine sound that escaped from his throat when he made love, who had seen him bare-assed and grinning in the park, coming helplessly at her first touch.

The voice, the eyes, the jellied, ill-defined face of whoever watched him, knowing the truth: that he would not escape his life, not even with love.

“Well, I couldn’t get her on the phone,” he said, and the lawyer put down his pen, ran his fuzzy pink hand down his face and then, holding the thin stripe of his black tie, began to laugh.

Rick bowed his head, breathed a single puff of air through his open mouth and then, closing it, crossing some gulf, slowly, wisely, began to grin.

“So I overreacted,” he said.

“Brother,” the lawyer said—and hadn’t some of the disdain left his voice, weren’t they laughing together now, fraternal. “Did you ever.”

Rick sat up, held out his hands. There was no doubt in the lawyer’s mind what the raised chin was meant to indicate now. The sudden swagger relieved him.

“So what are they going to do to me?” Rick said, as if he were prepared for an easy fistfight. “What are they going to charge me with?”

“Melodrama,” the lawyer said. Hoods he could handle. “Making a scene.

Stupidity. The whole damn neighborhood saw you.”

Rick threw himself back in his chair, the grin giving way to a look of impatient dismissal. Of course she was gone, changed forever. And this was what his life would be like. “I’m sorry,” he said in his best sarcastic voice. “I apologize, all right?”

The man smiled, playing his own ace. “Don’t apologize to me,” he said.

“She’s the one you got in trouble.”

That night or not long after, he woke himself from another nightmare and found that the shame, the sense of embarrassment and profound regret that had broken through his sleep, was no longer at his failure to claim her, to set back the time, but at his attempt.

In the days that followed the fight, a woman pulled into a small gas station somewhere between here and Ohio and asked quickly for the ladies’ room. She headed for the back of the station at a run and in her hurry pushed into the door without knocking. She found Sheryl standing at the sink, her wrists held under the running water. She had leaned over and placed her chin on her forearm and at first the woman thought she was about to faint, but she had done it merely to keep his bracelet from the water and the blood.

The woman turned back into the sunlight and called for help. When she turned again, Sheryl was sitting on the floor, her wrists on her thighs, the blood making her black pants shiny and staining the dirty pink tiles. She looked up at the woman somewhat sadly. There was a dark line of blood up the side of her yellow blouse and over her shoulder, made when she had raised her arm to toss back her hair.

The woman took a sheaf of paper towels and nearly covered her with them. Behind her, one of the attendants appeared in the doorway and said, “Jesus Christ.”

The small white sink was full of blood. On the ledge between the faucets there was the photograph and a long thin shard of glass.

The woman, who had four children of her own, could not keep the anger from her voice as she wrapped Sheryl’s arms in the rough gray towels and asked her over and over, “What were you trying to do?” as if she, or Sheryl, had been somehow mistaken.