The Scamp (24 page)

And then I swam. I liked to swim naked in darker parts of the lake. There was a public beach, and many other entry points that we'd walk to through the trees and go in with just our bodies, or with a canoe, a tube even, floating out in circles on a hot summer day. I came out of the blue-tinted pines white and naked. The mark in the sand at the shore from her weighted-down body, like the line a canoe leaves when you drag it in.

I knew the moon shone on my head.

Someone could have seen that. My white head, the white light, the middle of the lake like a spotlight was on it. The middle of the lake, so deep no one had ever measured it. My arms ached from pulling her. From gripping the kickboard. My legs, on fire from kicking.

I got as close as I could.

On the way back to shore, I put the kickboard under my shoulders and let my feet drag at the surface of the water, my face turned up to the moonlight, my breasts above the water. Cold, clean.

I didn't want her to know the details. When I told Florida, I only said I did it, and she didn't ask, or didn't believe me. I didn't want to feel tempted to make her believe me. Her body was not a willow I could snap, was not something I wanted to take apart in that way. I had learned to make it sing, for me, but not apart. Not disembodied.

I didn't know she would go into the water too. I'd watched her on the sand, in the daylight, a gray day when the ocean looked green, stooped in the white sand and making a shape that was a mermaid. A woman's arms and hair, her small waist and, below it, a full-hipped fish tail.

I love mermaids the best, she said to me.

I want to be something else, she said.

The wind whipped us red-faced that day, even in the heat, the salt, the bits of sand. We left there scrubbed. I left there with her, and went back alone.

I went back to wait. The ocean, green with envy, seething, and holding on to her tighter than I ever could.

nineteen

RAYELLE

It's not a great time to ask him about a motel. We don't have a destination, and outside of Wilmington we hit a fantastic thunderstorm that wags the Scamp all over the small road. All I want is to sleep inside a real building, with hallways and doors. Maybe even with a storm cellar.

He drives for hours before he stops. The car nearly out of gas, the Scamp's connection to the car sketchy at best. We find an old Fina with nothing else around it. There's a farmhouse farther down, and on the other side, an abandoned diner, shaped like a train car.

Couper gets out to fill the car, and a paper sign wags on the pump.
CASH ONLY
. Shaky handwriting in magic marker.

Fuck, he says.

What's the matter? I say. I roll down my window.

He half laughs. I don't suppose you have any cash, he says. Never mind, he says. I have a little. I just have to get more. He scuffs his feet through the dust of the parking lot and pays inside before he pumps less than half a tank into the Gran Torino.

Where are we? I ask out the window. It's dry here, but storm windy, like it's following us from the shore. The sky, bits of bright bright blue and a dark steel-gray.

I don't know, Couper says.

What?

I don't know. He shouts it the second time, and when he puts the nozzle back, it goes on with a hard, heavy clunk.

I watch him use his inhaler, breathing in, waiting, blowing out through a thin space in his lips. It makes his cheeks flush, and his hands tremble. He holds the phone after, looking for service. I watch the phone wobble in his hand.

It's the inhaler, he says.

I know, I say, soft. I feel cowed.

I didn't want you to think I was so old I can't hold my hands still, he says.

Couper, I say.

I'm going to get on the interstate, he says.

Are you okay to drive?

Yes, I'm okay to drive, he says.

I'm trying to help, I say.

He pauses for a long time then, his hands at ten and two on the wheel, the car idling in park, the tremble in his fingers still apparent.

Are you? he says.

Yes, I say.

Are you the beginning of this? he says.

I don't know.

I need you to try harder, he says.

On the interstate, we go quickly through miles of flat farmland, past tractor trailers and rest stops, and the storm follows us, raining down hard and washing up red dirt on the sides of the road and the windshield. Where the farms thin out, we get to shopping plazas, housing developments. He pulls off at an exit for a boulevard with one of everything you can think of: a Walmart, a McDonald's, a Roy Rogers, and a Sizzler. And behind them, rising up out of the parking lots, a Hampton Inn, a Days Inn, a Red Roof Inn. Couper waits at a red light, weighing his options.

I cannot sleep in another Walmart parking lot, or wash up in a Walmart bathroom. I want a bed, and a shower.

The boulevard is packed with suburban vehicles, minivans and station wagons,
SUV
s with TV screens in the backseats and little kids watching cartoons and kicking the front seats. People are out buying groceries, filling up before vacation. The bigger
SUV
s make such a spray on the road it floods our windshield, blinding us for a few feet when we pull out.

Can we just stay? I ask. I should probably go about it differently, but I feel like a kid in the car with Chuck again: overtired, looking for a place to stop, to still the vibration in my core. Chuck would drive for twelve hours straight to make good time, rumbling along through all the daylight hours. I'd have to beg him at the end of a long, hot day to please stop. He'd always look at the room first, see if it looked clean, smelled nice.
What is the difference?
I always thought.
We're putting my mother in there. She doesn't look clean or smell nice. She smells like gin and she looks like hell.
I always wanted to stay at a place if it had a pool. At least there was that. Swimming at night with the lights underwater.

I think about Couper's leg against mine at the motel pool. Bobbing in the water at the deep end.

Please? I say and he swings into the first lot.

Goddammit, Rayelle, he says. I'm working on it.

I just thought it would be nice, I say, to sleep on a bed that is not also a table. Just tonight, I say.

He turns the car off under the overhang at La Quinta, where water pours in parallel lines off either end of the roof, drumming on the Scamp.

I thought you had a bed at home, Couper says.

You watched my mother throw it out, I say.

I didn't make you go with me, he says.

I didn't say you did.

Don't revise this someday into how I forced you to come along.

You don't even know where you're going, I shout. All I asked for was a room.

Well, he says. Shall I book the honeymoon suite?

At La Quinta? I say. Then, to make things worse, I add, I don't know. You probably have to file divorce papers first. Before you move in with wife number five.

He huffs a little, beginning to laugh. Wow, he says.

I don't need to be anybody's wife that goddamn bad, I say, but he covers me up.

Shhh, he says, and leans over.

Don't you dare kiss me, I say, but all he does is hold my face. He holds it still by the chin, with his thumb and forefinger, the way you'd inspect a kid.

Settle down, he says.

When he comes back from the office, he tosses me a room key, which would be more dramatic if it were an actual key, flopping on a chain, a big plastic key ring shaped like a diamond, but it's a card. It kind of flutters into my lap.

You're not coming? I say.

You wanted a room, he says. I got you a room.

I say it again. You're not coming.

He waits. I think he's going to wait for me to get out, but if I do, I don't know where he'll go. And I don't have a thing on me. Not a phone, not a dollar. Nothing. If he goes, I don't know if he'll come back, or where the fuck we even are. I'll sit in that room by myself for as long as he's paid for it, which is maybe only till tomorrow, and
then I'll have to scrounge for quarters, or call home collect, to see if Chuck will drive to the middle of nowhere to get me.

The sun comes out from behind heavy, dark clouds. The sky, so much bigger here, the clouds like towers, the light, electric. It comes out like gold, and shines on the parking lot in one bright spot that blinds me. I have to lay my hand over my eyes. The water, still dripping from the roof like drops of light raining down.

Come with me, I say. Couper. I don't know what you want me to say.

I'm afraid of where we're going, he says.

I thought you didn't know where we're going.

I don't, he says. He starts the car up and takes it around the fronts of all the rooms, all of them with doors facing out to a sidewalk, and a fenced-in pool in the middle. It's a real problem, he adds.

I look at the pool. The fence is laced with plastic so you can't see through it, but no one is in it anyway, not in the storm.

Are you coming in? I say.

I have things to do, he says. He waits next to the car with the door open while I key in and then starts to get back in the car.

Like what? I say from the threshold.

Phone calls, he says.

To? I ask. It's dark and cool in the room, and the light in the parking lot is blinding, the sun coming from behind his head.

Rayelle, he says, but won't answer.

Fine, I say. Get yourself fucking divorced while you're at it.

Why do you care? he says.

That you're not divorced? I say.

Yeah, he says. What's it to you? Why do you care?

I laugh, annoyed, standing in the open doorway and letting in flies and letting out the cool air. What are you trying to get me to say? I ask.

I'm trying to get you to admit that you give a shit about something, he says.

You want me to say I give a shit about you? That's real romantic, Couper. Thanks for the swayback queen bed, too.

I do, he says, before he gets in the car. I give a shit about you, he says.

I'd like to know how he proposed to all those women.

The shower is weak, but hot. There's cheap and strong smelling pink soap, and little plastic bottles of shampoo and conditioner that I have to use all of just to get through my hair. The soap dries my skin out, on my face, my elbows, even on my shins, where there's now a fine coat of blond hair. I rub my hands down the fronts of my legs. I don't mind it.

When he goes, Couper takes just the car. He leaves the Scamp unhitched, detached in the parking lot. It looks ridiculously small beside the building. When he returns, he's had his hair cut. He comes in with his
own key, and goes right to the sink, where he gets out a shaving kit I've somehow never seen, a leather bag with a real razor, not a plastic disposable. I watch him lather with a brush, and pull the blade over his cheeks. When he's done, he doesn't talk to me, he just gets in the shower.

I leave the towel and wait, naked. The air in the room still drying out, the AC going full blast, cold and damp at the same time. I lie belly down on the bed, my legs bent at the knee and my feet up in the air. The bedspread, that slick chintz that water rolls off of. It has mauve flowers in a pattern that hides dirt, and who knows what else.

I kind of thought he would drop everything to fuck me. Instead, he doesn't even talk, just shaves, and gets in the shower for fifteen minutes, while I lie there thinking,
Why didn't he drop everything to fuck me?

I've gone full speed from twenty-three to fifty-three.

I grab the remote. I'm not sure what day it is, and when I think to look on Couper's phone for the date, I realize he brought it into the bathroom with him, perched, I imagine, on the back of the toilet, or on the windowsill that looks out on the trees behind the motel. In case what? In case Amanda calls? Kaplan? I don't know if he's hiding me from them, or them from me.

I find the weather channel. Ninety-two degrees. Ninety percent humidity, which makes it feel like 105. I might have argued 150. It's oppressive. Scattered thunderstorms. Asheville. July 3.

They switch to some stock photos of fireworks, of families in the park, sitting on blankets. Fireworks over a river.

I have always hated them. I don't remember the time before, when I guess maybe I didn't hate them.

Last summer, the one time we did something as a family, me, Eli, Summer, she just bounced on her daddy's lap, unafraid. We had our camp chairs by the lake, waiting for the colors to boom over the horizon. Other families around us, other kids, running with glow necklaces. A barbecue going, the air like lighter fuel and smoke. We had a cooler of beers between us. I crossed my arms over my chest and leaned my head down on my lap, and shook.

What the hell is wrong with you? Eli asked. We were new at this, at the family outing. Out without his parents, without a safety net. No one to come whisk Summer away when we couldn't calm her down. He held her loose under her arms, her arms bare, and her tiny armpits silky soft. She was in that phase when all she wanted was to stand on your lap while you held her, and she jumped. Eli had a tallboy tucked in the cup holder of his chair. His face, sunburned from an afternoon at the lake, his brow, furrowed at me.

The sound of fireworks, the heavy boom and sparkle, makes an ashy taste in my mouth. Sometimes, you think you don't remember a thing that happened, a car accident, a bad fall on a bike, because it's just that thing in your head. Just the word,
accident
, without detail. But
lying there, naked on a motel bed in the middle of a strange state, I see that old Fourth of July like it's happening right in front of me again. Nudie, sitting in the grass with a paper bag of firecrackers. He'd light a whole line of them, strung together, holding them in his hand while they went off one by one, and shaking them out like a match when it got too close to his fingers. All the men, Doe, Chuck, even, were stupid like that, pulling stunts in front of the girls, Look, watch how long I can hold this before it blows off my thumb. The crackle-sulfur smell of sparklers. The gun-barrel smell of snakes. The big red waxy barrel of a cherry bomb.