The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac (17 page)

It was not as though she expected him to love her again. In truth, she doubted they'd ever really loved each other in the ridiculous, knock-kneed manner you read about in books. But if he could just
admire
her once more … why, that could change everything. Love was a paltry, insignificant thing: There one day, gone another. But admiration, respect: From those could sprout great trees, towering redwoods, that could reach and reach and almost touch—

And then he was at the door, knocking violently, and the trees in her reverie shook and tottered. Amelia sat before her, withdrawn, hugging herself again. Gladys touched the girl's shoulder and then rushed to the door in her expensive pumps, smoothing her skirt, telling herself to
calm down, would you, calm down!
He was here. She opened the door.

Here he was.

“Please,” she said grandly. “Please. Come in.” She beamed. She didn't mean to look so happy, so psychotically happy. But she was! “She's here, darling, and she's doing
wonderfully
.”

She stepped back and spread one arm open like a wing, directing him into the house. Eli was not smiling. He was frowning the way he did when concentrating, the way he did when he looked over bills or read one of his dense scientific journals. Oh, but she admired that face, even that smart, unhappy expression. It pleased her to no end the way that he strode into the house as though he still lived there, as though it were still in his name.
Some part of him believes it's still his
, Gladys knew.
Some part of him understands this is home.

Amelia tiptoed into the foyer behind them and stood off to one side, biting her lip. Her father came toward her and embraced her. The girl smiled—pleased or amused, Gladys was unsure. Eli snapped away from her then and held her at arm's length, looking her over.

“You've lost weight. You're pale. Are your hands shaking?”

The girl opened her mouth but said nothing.

He plucked up one of her hands. “Yes,” he confirmed. “Shaking.”

“Low blood sugar,” Gladys said cheerfully. “She was ravenous. Just sucked down some of my chicken. The shaking will stop any moment, I think. Would you like some chicken, darling? A little bite of cold chicken while we sit and chat?”

“I hate cold chicken,” he said.

Horrified, Gladys brought a hand to her throat. How had she forgotten? He'd always hated cold chicken. He liked it straight from the oven, so hot that it would blister the roof of his mouth. Gladys couldn't believe her lapse of memory. Surely he could forgive her something like this, considering what they'd all been through in the last week? Surely he wouldn't hold this against her, too? After all, had she ever forgotten anything before, ever? No, she had not.

But when she started to speak, he hushed her. “Gladys, not now. I'm taking Amelia to the hospital.”

Amelia shook free of him. “Like hell you are,” she said.

“Amelia,” Gladys protested. “Language!”

Amelia rushed from the foyer and pitched herself onto a couch in the living room. Eli went after her, tried to sit with her and hold her, but she sprang upright and wriggled free of his grasp. She moved to the recliner instead, which had room for only one person, and then she drew her knees up to her chest and buried her head in her thighs.

Eli angrily turned on Gladys. “Is this what you call healthy behavior?”

“Let me heat up the chicken. The oven heats up in a jiffy. I'll give you the thighs and we'll sit in the kitchen and have a chat while she relaxes. She just needs to unwind, Eli.”

Eli's jaw worked. His eyes glared out at her from behind those large red frames, two blue raging stars. “I will not tolerate this, Gladys. She needs to see a doctor. We have no idea what that man has done to her. Or whatever other creep she ran into out there.”

“That young man—”

“Gladys, do not fight me on this. I'm a doctor, I—”

“Does anybody care what I think?” Amelia wailed from the recliner, lifting her head from her knees. “'Cause I don't wanna go. I'm not gonna go. If you take me, I'll leap from the car. I'll scream. You know what I'll do? I'll run away again. 'Cause that's what I did. I stole your car and I ran away. To get married, if you wanna know.”

And then she returned her head to her knees and sobbed. Eli stood there for a moment, caught in the headlights of his daughter's sorrow, unable to move. Gladys could feel his anger evaporating. He went to console his daughter. By the slant of Eli's shoulders, Gladys saw that she—the mother, the ex-wife—was uninvited. She left the room and went into the kitchen and stood next to the softly thrumming refrigerator. She bit down on her hand, into the soft flesh between thumb and forefinger, and tasted her own blood.

She was not upset. She was joyous. The three of them, however estranged, still formed a little Bermuda Triangle of familial love. Events had, in fact, transpired tonight exactly as they did during the marriage—their miscommunication, their useless arguments, their daughter's bleating solidarity with her mother, Eli's shift from anger to compassion, her own quiet retreat. It was all so familiar, so wonderful. She bit herself to keep from screaming with joy, from laughing out loud and ruining the moment. Too soon, Eli would remember his new wife and his new daughter and he would leave them again.
The eternal return,
Gladys thought.
Isn't that right? The eternal return?
Gladys had not paid much attention in college to her professor's ramblings, but she had remembered that phrase. The eternal return. The happiness and the sadness of it.

Gladys did not want the moment to end. Not yet. She understood that it would end, but if she could manage to make it linger …

Through the window she saw Vanessa's ugly sedan. She had heard from Amelia that Eli had wanted a new sports car, but Vanessa had called it an inappropriate purchase for a man with an infant. Gladys thought with some pleasure about Vanessa's disapproval, of how it must have irritated Eli. Vanessa was not the sort of woman who could appreciate the finer things. Not the way Gladys appreciated them.

Next to the butcher block rested the dirty cleaver she had used to cut apart the raw chicken. Gladys took it up and washed it carefully in the sink. She was used to being her own cook and housekeeper now, and it suited her fine. She had thought she would miss the help, given how she could no longer afford it, but it turned out to be comforting to clean again, to cook with her own hands.

Clean and bright, the blade shone. It was like a magical thing, a thing that could change a mere moment into an hour, a night, even an eternity.

She heard her daughter speaking in the other room. Eli was slowly bringing her around again.

Still clutching the cleaver, Gladys slipped out of the kitchen and into the garage, walking trancelike out the side door and into the driveway. She stood there before Vanessa's car as the stars twitched around her, the frames of her neighbors' homes snapping in the ebbing light. The crickets started up in the grass, rustling it with their impatient wings. The trees winced. Then the cool air kissed her bare scalp and caressed the raw red line of her burn, and Gladys felt a great calm.

It was hard to remember when the good life ended and the worst life began.

But she could change it back. The cleaver gleamed and winked beneath the flickering streetlamp.

Hacking at the tires didn't work. She had to poke into them instead with the sharp edge of the blade, little tiny holes, dozens of them in each tire, and at first she worried that they wouldn't make much of an impact. But then came the whistling sound and the car drooped to one side. She couldn't stop with one tire (no doubt he carried a spare) and she couldn't stop with two (for fear he would borrow her spare) and by the third tire she knew she would do the fourth, just to complete the work. Oh, it felt good. Marriage work. The sort of daily, repetitive work a wife did to make sure that her husband and children were safe and sound and content.

He would not be able to leave now, not exactly when he wished. Her own car was trapped in the garage behind the sedan, so there was no giving him a ride herself. Phone calls would be made. He would have to return to retrieve the car, most likely, or maybe he would send a mechanic. Either way, she had bought herself—and she had bought Amelia—more time alone with him.

She went back into the house and into the living room and found the two of them sitting there, watching Johnny Carson, kicked back and comfortable. Eli had gone to the kitchen and retrieved the rest of the cold chicken, and they sat snacking on it contentedly, as though some big conflict had been resolved.

“Where were you?” Eli asked. He had not seen her outside, shredding his tires.

“Bathroom,” she said.

She stood there watching them, looming over them, drunk with pleasure.

“You two,” she said affectionately.

Amelia peeled her eyes away from the television and looked at Gladys, at first lazily, and then with concern.

“Mom,” she said, sitting up. “Mom?”

Gladys looked at her hands. Her fingers were bleeding. How had she not noticed? A small bloody trail followed her from the kitchen. She still held the cleaver. Why hadn't she set it in the sink, as had been her intention? Why had she not washed it and slid it back into the wooden cutlery block? Why had she brought it here, to stand before her husband and daughter, bleeding and guilty?

Both of them were holding chicken thighs, which they now returned to the plate, half-eaten. The television droned. Eli rose to his feet, approaching her warily.

“Mom,” Amelia was saying. Gladys could barely hear her through the fog of her own thoughts. “Mom. Put down the knife.”

“It's a cleaver,” she corrected.

Eli's arms went around her then, soft as a lover's embrace, and Gladys closed her eyes and smelled his familiar musk (one of her yearly Christmas gifts to him, which, she noted tenderly, he still used). She sank to the floor beneath him, surrendering herself to the knees that pinned down her shoulders, the bony hands that held down her wrists. She moaned.

To Amelia, he cried, “Quick! The knife!”

Amelia came forward with a dead look in her eyes. Some light there had been extinguished, although Gladys wasn't sure when. The girl pried the cleaver away from her mother's bloody fingers, digging in with her stubby nails.

She'd been misunderstood.

Her luck hadn't changed at all.

Or had it?

It had changed! After all, there was this
togetherness
. Look at them, the three of them, struggling together here on the floor, embracing and shoving and crying and grunting.
Togetherness
.

Gladys allowed herself this, then, despite the biting pain in her shoulders and wrists and fingers, despite the barking demands of her husband to call an ambulance, despite her daughter's robotic senseless knuckle-cracking and stony uncertainty:
togetherness
.

And that, in the end, was all Gladys had ever really wanted.

 

STAY DOWN

Marion knew he was a creep. He hadn't always been this way, but he certainly was one now. He was a creep, as pure as they came. He liked teenage girls. He didn't rape them (not exactly), but he did cajole them into sex. They were, all of them, good girls, if a little bored, attracted to his meanness. He loved the feel of their velvet stomachs and their knifelike hipbones. He loved it when they pouted or whined. He loved it when he dumped them and they called him on the phone and cried.
Get over it,
he'd say.
Get a life.
He loved it when they spat and clawed at him. He loved it when he saw them for the last time. He loved their messy crying eyes, their swollen protesting lips.
Those stupid girls,
he thought. He loved them all so much.

He was nearing thirty now, aimless.
Heading nowhere special,
his dad said, and then his dad would laugh and pull out a wad of cash and shove it at him and tell him to get lost, to have fun. Marion would drive around, looking for girls, and inevitably a girl would appear who was intriguing and intrigued, and he would take up with her for a while and pretend he was her age, or somewhere close to her age, to avoid any sort of nonsense with parents or authorities. Some girls snuck a peek at his wallet or just naturally caught on. They rarely gave him grief about it. They liked it. Girls wanted to grow up. He helped them figure it out. It was, he joked with himself, his charitable contribution to womankind.

Then he met Amelia and everything got fucked.

She was better than the rest of them, maybe because she was a wreck. God, how he loved her. She was already broken, already mature, hard to make laugh, hard to hurt. He'd never been with a girl so tall. Her height embarrassed him. She was unashamed of it, or maybe just unaware. He teased her about it and she rolled her eyes. He wished he could shame her like the other girls. She gave him no power. Amelia treated him with some affection and some amusement, but her heart was off-limits. The role reversal, for Marion, was painful and baffling.

I am the adult here,
he wanted to tell her.
I decide who gets to be amused, who gets to be scared.
She would roll her eyes if he said that to her, or groan in deep annoyance, so he kept quiet.

She was the reason things got fucked.

They had just met the old man, the old man with the strange, familiar face that Marion could almost place. Something was off with the old cat. He kissed Marion on the cheek and Marion recoiled, blinded by sunlight, confused. Amelia gasped. In a better state of mind, Marion would have hauled off and punched the old fucker, but something about the man's face unnerved him. He wiped away the kiss with the back of his hand and then touched Amelia's arm, saying to her, “Let's go.” Normally, Amelia might have laughed at him for being a sissy, but she was terrified and silent. She drew herself into his shoulder, and Marion wrapped an arm around her, charged by her need.