Owls seduced Jennifer. They captured her in the fall of 2002. By the time she broke away, it was 2007. She borrowed a car and drove to her mother and stepfather’s house in Woodbridge, Virginia; at least, this was the house that Jen’s family had lived in the last time she’d spoken with them, when Jen was seventeen years old and on the brink of running away with the cook at the summer camp where she had a summer job as a camp counselor.
There are many things in her life that Jen knows she will never forget, but the feeling she had when she pulled up into the driveway of the house that used to be her home—with the same graffiti-tagged concrete wall muffling the roar of the highway beyond—and saw the overgrown grass, the broken window, the foreclosure notice stuck to the door– remains the most visceral and painful. She felt a ferocious heat and then a chill, like the skin being pulled from her arms and legs, the hair pulled from her head. The first seventeen years of her life, ripped from her. She sat in the car and cried.
Her tears dried. The following week, she left for South Carolina to begin basic training. In the end, this is what happened: CJ gained joint custody of his now eight-year old daughter, Robin, and moved to California, where R. visits him during the summer, flying cross-country on her own with iPod headphones jammed in her ears for the duration of the flight and the hours spent standing in lines at security. Teresa and Andy reunited and eventually married. Andy returned to medical school and became an emergency room doctor. CJ gave Jen a book of the birds of the Middle East and a hardcover copy of Birding Babylon, but after she shipped out to Iraq, neither Andy nor CJ heard from her again. The truth is that she doesn’t want to write to either of them. She’s had her fill of them. She has concerns bigger than relationships now, and ideas larger than language.
The Girl
1.
On February 12, 2005, a Northern Lapwing appeared in a muddy field in Creagerstown, Maryland, seven miles from the house CJ shared with Andy and Jennifer, and thousands of miles from its typical territory in the British Isles and the temperate climate of central Europe.
Jennifer opened the big Sibley guide to the Lapwing entry: an enormous Killdeer with a ridiculous plume bobbing on the center of its head.
“That bird looks like a joke,” said Andy, before turning back to his cigarettes and Washington Post. The hawk-headed parrot walked across the table and reached up to chew at a corner of the newspaper. Andy rattled the paper and the parrot squawked and flew into the living room in search of CJ.
“This lapwing,” Jen quoted hesitantly, “runs away with the shell on his head.” She laughed. “I can’t believe I actually remember that.” Her community college English class had done Hamlet in the fall semester. “I guess I haven’t been throwing away all this tuition for nothing.” In her heart, though, this was not a joke. CJ worked hard to pay for Jen’s classes. They had given up their freedom to live in rented houses so that she could complete her associate’s degree.
They had a Lapwing party. It lasted for two weeks. Amateur birders and scientists and ornithology grad students came from all over and slept in sleeping bags on the floor in front of the living room fireplace. CJ made pans of artichoke lasagna, and every night Jen and Andy and the birders drank countless glasses of Yellowtail Merlot and looked at digital images of the Lapwing that the birders took that day and uploaded to bird websites.
Nobody went in the basement where CJ’s hydroponics operation lived, but the grad students smoked the stuff when it was offered with the wine after dinner.
2.
In the beginning, Jen and CJ lived at a public campground outside of Norton, where the coal trucks roared down the mountains and the weather came in fits: sun and rain and gauzy fog, all within in an hour or two. Norton was a world of wet stone, rotting wood, moss, and rusty metal. There were trees and stones and bare patches of tall grass, and then there were trailers. There were hilly forests, and then there were wide driveways to the coal complexes, barricaded by huge industrial fences.
Jen was working in a nursing home at the time. The home was a small, single story building near the train tracks, a renovated elementary school. She worked at night, washing and folding linens and nightgowns. The job barely had any responsibility to it; working there was like holding your breath, waiting for something to come along and challenge you. One evening in late September, Jen ate a bunch of mushrooms with some hippies in the campground and then went in to work.
She stood folding the towels and watching dark clouds accumulate over the tree line. Their darkness was thick as oil paint, illuminating the golden branches so they appeared like pieces of cut paper adhered to grey felt. Jennifer folded towels and watched the storm pull closer, the trees around the nursing home swaying. Soon the rain came in a sweeping curtain, pouring over the flat roof; the leaky places in the home started to drip. The nurses and the custodian ran around, and Jen folded clean towels, stacking them on the lobby couch and on the coffee table covered by Good Housekeeping and Guideposts magazines. She felt rain dripping on the back of her neck and her hands. She stared at her hands on the white towels. She felt warm rain on her neck and shoulders, spreading in the fabric of her t-shirt.
She took deep breaths like sighs, doubting herself, doubting her sensations, thinking of CJ. Before he took her away from the camp, he said, “If you come with me, everything about your life with change. You can never go back.” He wasn’t being romantic; he was telling her the truth because he knew she wouldn’t see it in the cloud of being seventeen and impulsive. “Your parents will disown you,” he’d warned her. They had.
She folded towels; thunder rolled over the roof of the nursing home. Hail the size of green walnuts crashed in the parking lot. The custodian brought in handfuls of hail. “Look at this shit,” he said. “It’s wild!” The wild night brought fallen tree limbs, flooded roads. The power went out. At midnight, Jen sat in a bedroom talking to a resident. The resident was half asleep and talking about things she’d seen in her lifetime. “Keep telling me about it, Granny,” Jen told her. “Keep telling me.”
From the window Jen could see the gravel rise and the edge of the train tracks illuminated by the floodlights from the mining facility. She stared at the glow; the longer she stared, the less aware she was of herself and the greater the glow became. The glow was imprinted on her brain; when she shut her eyes, she saw it still. The mining company owned her; she saw its lights in her mind. When the train came, it roared right over her; the mining company owned all sound and violence, it brought the storms, it brought the noise.
“Whoa, whoa!” said the old woman as the coal train roared closer.
“Hang on, Granny,” Jen told her, shutting her eyes tight. The sound of the train washed over her like the storm. Her heart raged in her ears. She didn’t know if her eyes were open or closed. Had she dreamed the summer up? Was she at home in her bed; was it a school night? Oh God, she thought behind her blind eyes, please God, don’t let it be a school night; I can’t bear to go back to school after living in the woods, even if I only dreamed it.
Gradually, the light came into her mind again. She stood up; it was morning and her shift was over. She walked into the lobby, where CJ was waiting for her. “CJ,” she said, “Oh my God!” She wanted to cry with love and joy. He was sitting in the lobby, as always, in his favorite grey sweater and his denim jacket, reading the morning newspaper out of Bristol. Outside, the dawn was just breaking, fresh and full of possibilities. The birds were awake and singing at the tops of their voices. CJ took Jen’s hand and they walked across the parking lot with its litter of leaves and small branches. “Some storm,” he said. Across the parking lot, across the two-lane highway, was a small weedy area and then the start of the forest, the tough mountain forest with its knotty roots and stones. Up amongst the trees was a crumbling chimney left from an old house that had fallen down. “Hey,” said CJ, jerking his head. “I see…”
A huge white bird burst out from the trees, from a fallen mossy wall of stone, gliding low and fast, utterly silent. The bird was a shattering white in the clouds of Jen’s sleepy mind; it was too large, it was too quiet for its size. It coasted over the meadow, the highway, the nursing home, and disappeared into the realm of the coal complex, dipping beyond the train tracks. It was so fast that Jen was hardly sure she’d seen it, yet the sight of it was seared in her mind. “There you go,” said CJ. “Tyto alba, sweetheart; check it off your list.” It was her first Barn Owl.
3.
2006. Two days before Christmas, and they’d driven down to Fredericksburg to talk with some people CJ knew there and look at some of their hydro equipment. Andy wanted to go to a bookstore he remembered on Caroline Street, but when they got into town they saw that the bookstore had gone out of business and a boutique had taken over the storefront. They drove out of the town into a commercialized area with stretches of parking lots and shopping centers. The highway was gridlocked with the traffic pulling out from the shopping mall. Jen sat in the back of the Subaru with the window cracked, tipping the ash from her cigarette out to flutter across the glass. The sky was cloudy and the weather half-heartedly chilly, the traffic lights and the lit signs of the shopping centers becoming more brilliant in the waning light. At the edge of town the shopping centers fell away and houses appeared, rows of townhouses like waving ribbons through the pastures. The sides of the highway were distorted with construction, orange signs guiding the way through reworked lanes and half-completed asphalt. They passed a cornfield sliced by bulldozers, the earth piled up in mounds. Little flags of orange tape fluttered on the No Trespassing signs.
They went to a Chinese buffet on the western outskirts of town, near the used car lots and the aging, half-abandoned shopping centers. The place was crowded with elderly couples and sprawling families eating platters of soft-shelled crab. The waitress seated the three of them in the smoking section at the back of the restaurant. The embossed wallpaper was stained with cigarette smoke and the ashtray on the table was full of a previous diner’s cigarette butts. They ordered drinks: a Mai Tai, a double Jack on the rocks, and a pot of hot, black tea.
The restaurant reminded Jen of many places she’d eaten at with CJ in their early years. For a short period, she’d worked at a Waffle House and the smell of grease and smoke always made her ache for those times. It didn’t often make her want to eat, though. She stirred her drink with its plastic sword of punctured fruit, plucking rummy cherries from the glass. The waitress had brought three small tea cups with the tea pot, and CJ lined all three up in front of his plate and poured tea into each one. He had two plates: one full of crab legs, and the other, empty and waiting for demolished crab leg shells. Jen watched an obese child fill a plate with egg rolls. She sipped her drink and felt around in her bag for her cigarettes.
“Are you going to eat?” asked Andy. He was consuming lo mein and washing it down with Jack Daniels.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I just can’t decide. Why don’t you go over there and surprise me with something?”
He slid out of the booth and returned with a dish of fried shrimp slicked over with sweet and sour sauce. Jen dragged a fork through the sauce and watched the way the sauce retreated back to fill the ridges left by the tines. She stabbed a square of pineapple and ate it. The waitress, a small and cranky Chinese girl, came and asked them if they wanted anything else. CJ was still sipping from the second of his three teacups, drinking tea and picking crab meat out of the shells with his fingers. Andy wanted another whiskey.
“And me, too,” said Jen. “I’ll take one, too.”
The waitress shrugged and went to get the drinks. From the front of the restaurant, a baby screamed. Jen became aware of some blinking Christmas lights strung up around the front window.
The waitress returned with glasses of whiskey. Andy took a long swallow and resumed eating greasy noodles. Jen peered into her glass. The liquor shimmered slightly like oil. The smell of it stung her nostrils. She took a sip; it burned down her throat, through her chest. She loved drinking, but whiskey was never at the top of her list. It was too much work; it burned. She couldn’t lose track with whiskey as she could with rum or wine. Whiskey took an almost physical concentration of nerves; it was exhausting to drink it.
She lifted her glass again, trying not to scrunch her face up as the drink burned down her throat. She lit a cigarette; the taste of smoke tempered the drink. She started to alternate drags from the cigarette and sips from the glass.
Andy pushed his empty plate aside and eyed her. “Watch it,” he told her. “You’d better have more to eat.”
“Whatever,” she said. He brought her a plate of crab rangoon. She stuck one of the wantons through with a knife, prying out chunks of cream cheese. “There’s no way I’m eating this,” she declared.
Under the table, CJ slipped his hand up over her thigh and squeezed. He kept his face down-turned, toward his crab, but Jen was sure she saw him trying to hide a smirk.
“You’re going to get sick,” Andy told her.
“I can handle it,” said Jen. “I weigh more than you do, anyhow.”
He snorted. “You absolutely do not,” he said.
“I’m a big, healthy girl, and you’re skin and bones.” She dropped the butt of her cigarette into the ashtray and finished her drink in one quick gulp. Things were starting to feel a little sped up, a little brighter. She felt a crest of euphoria. “Where’s the waitress?”
The waitress came over and started to gather up the dirty plates. “We want six Jacks, doubles, straight up,” Jen told her.
The waitress said, in a deflated voice, “I can’t bring you that much all at once. You can have three on the table now and the next three when you’re done.”
“OK, whatever,” Jen told her. “Just bring them.”
CJ held one of the tiny teacups in his hand, staring at Jen. She grinned. Andy put his elbows up on the cleared table, tugging at the sleeve of his sweater. The waitress brought three drinks on a tray. Andy reached for a glass, his long fingers circling and lifting it. He drained the glass all at once. The waitress hadn’t even made her way back to the bar yet.
Jen picked up her glass and did the same; she realized then that, if she drank quickly, she couldn’t really taste it or really feel the way it seared right down her throat. She set her empty glass down. She was floating. Her hands tingled. She stared at them.
“Your face is bright red, Jen,” she heard Andy say. His voice sounded distant and far away and above her.
“Your face is red, too,” she said; her voice sounded like it was coming from a tube. Really, Andy’s face wasn’t any redder than usual. Jen was aware of a strong floating sensation. She floated up; she saw Andy hook the rim of the third glass with his fingers and drag it toward him. He sipped from it like it was nothing, like it was tea.
She felt herself sliding back, back down the tunnel. Beside her, she heard CJ say, “Actually, we’ll just take the check now, please.” He touched Jen’s shoulder. “Are you OK?” His face was huge before her. She stared at the pale freckles on his cheeks. “Come on, sweetheart,” she head him say, “time to head out.”
Jen stood up, and immediately an uncontrollable urge coursed through her. “My God,” she said, perhaps too loudly. “I have to lie down. I just have to.”
It was getting late; there were only a few customers left in the restaurant, and the staff was taking the buffet trays away for cleaning. “I have to lie down,” Jen repeated. She crouched on the floor, fumbling to spread her pea coat out on the carpet. She didn’t feel drunk or ill in the typical way, just an undeniable desire to lie down, to be horizontal. She didn’t feel shame at all; when her head touched the carpeted floor, and her entire body stretched out, a great calm came over her. She stared out across the floor, across the dirty carpet and broken pieces of fortune cookies, a crab claw, and felt a great wave of peace come over. It came over her again, along with a hunger for eye-closing. So she closed her eyes and floated, simply floated, away.
Sometimes, when Jen has a hard time sleeping, she thinks of that evening when she passed out on the floor of the Chinese restaurant. It wasn’t a real sleep, of course. When you’re unconscious, though, it doesn’t really matter how you got there.
4.
Jen still recalls a conversation she and CJ had with Andy the first summer they met him. They were eating dinner together in the townhouse in Fairfax where they lived before they ran out of money and moved to rural Maryland.
“How do you feel about monogamy?” Jen remembers asking Andy as she pressed a too-large leaf of radicchio quickly through her lips. “I’ve found that a lot of people just can’t live with those restrictions.”
“Monogamy is very rare in nature,” explained CJ. “It’s counter-productive in an evolutionary sense.”
She said it, she said that she agreed with CJ, but she didn’t believe it. What they had was counter-something…but what? At the house in Maryland, Jen had no bed of her own. She slept with CJ, she slept with Andy, or she slept between the two of them. When she looks back on that time, she feels a little sick, the way you feel after you’ve had too many drinks or too much dessert. The way you feel when you know you’ve crossed the line.
5.
Who told? Who gave him away? It must have been one of the graduate students. The men from the sheriff’s office banged on the door with their batons. It was very early in the morning and Jen had to scramble in the dark to find her clothes.
Then it was all a blur. Jen and Andy took the parrot and Andy’s ex-girlfriend came and got them and took them to Fairfax. Teresa was a lawyer. She contacted the Frederick County Sheriff’s office and illuminated the places that Jen would have preferred to keep dark. CJ had arrest records in West Virginia and Kentucky. Teresa said, “At least he’s been paying his child support. That will help him in court, maybe.”
“Child support?” said Jen. “There’s a child?”
6.
Here is a photograph of Jennifer at age seventeen. It’s July, she’s at camp in the Shenandoah Mountains, working her first job as a camp counselor and living in the wilderness for the first time in her life. The camp sessions last two weeks, with four days off between them. This is one of those free, long camp weekends when the children are gone and the counselors drink beers on the concrete edge of the pool. She is wearing a dark blue two-piece bathing suit; it fits her ample young body like a second skin. She has her arms back behind her head, her sunglasses on; she is confident, relaxed and smiling at the friend who holds the camera.
There are other photos as well; Jen with three of her friends, standing in front of the cabin where their charges sleep and the rain beats against the roof each night as the mountain thunderstorms roll in. Jen and her friends are all glowing; they have their arms around each other’s shoulders. They are high on their youth and the future that stretches before them.
When Jen worked in the camp kitchen, she told the cook, “I’ve got some issues with self-control,” and laughed. CJ looked at her from across the counter. He was chopping up chicken breasts with an enormous knife. He set the knife down, looked her in the eye, and said, “Demonstrate, please.”
The Lawyer
This was her office, her desk, her coffee. When she woke very early in the freezing morning, it was her square of dawn gradually coloring over the frosty cars and icy sidewalks. As soon as the sidewalks started freezing in November, she moved her run to the gravel footpaths that wound their way through the forest parks of North Arlington. Winter wouldn’t keep her from her morning routine, just as summer couldn’t keep her from hot coffee. Habit motivated her. If she broke out of her routine, there was no telling what might happen.
For instance, she might find herself driving from Arlington to Reston on a cloudy December afternoon, sitting in traffic in a panic, almost always ready to turn around at the next exit, but missing it. Missing each exit on purpose and trembling all over, gripping the steering wheel. She had to drive around for a while until she found his apartment complex, and when she found it she parked and watched the snow flurries falling in heavy flakes against her windshield, melting immediately. The complex was dull brick, the parking lot half-filled with older model cars. She felt conspicuous in Henri’s Mercedes. Some children ran out from the opening of the building, joyous in the meager snowfall. She didn’t see his car in the lot; perhaps he wasn’t in. Maybe she was mistaken, and he didn’t live here. He was gone and she’d never see him again. That close, hopeful, quiet part of her life was over forever.
She got out of the car and smoothed her long coat and her hair. She was still adjusting to the new length of her hair, and the bareness of her neck and ears astonished her. She wound a silk scarf around her throat, gripping the car keys in her fist and walking toward the building and out of the cold. The smell in the condo building—wet concrete, must, curry—was an echo from her college days. She remembered a comment Andy had made when they were undergraduates, one of the rare astute comments Andy announced out of the rhythm of his quiet. He said that college was an equalizer, and nowhere else were so many people of different values and backgrounds brought together to live in near squalor. After graduation everyone splits apart, drawn back to the lifestyles that matched their upbringing. The rich kids were raised up again, and the poor kids knew how much they could do without.
She went up the linoleum steps and rapped on his door. Her heart leaped. And then he was there, looking as he always had, tall and fragile, young, thin, with color high on his pale cheeks, like they’d been roughly rubbed. His dark hair was too long, like the hair of the teenagers she watched from her office window skateboarding on curbs and railings. He wore a grey sweater she didn’t recognize. She fell into him. His skinny body was so familiar, it made her tremble. He smelled of cigarettes.
“Why are you here?” he said into her hair.
“I brought you your mail,” she said.
He smoothed her hair. “I don’t want it,” he told her.
“I miss you so much,” Teresa said. She looked up at him, gripping his arms. “I’m losing my mind. I love you. I want you to be a part of my life again.”
“That’s impossible,” he said, and smiled.
A grey cat came from the shadows of the corridor and moved over their feet, Andy’s feet in socks and Teresa’s pumps. Teresa knelt to stroke the cat, vibrating under her palm. She began to feel anxious again. She glanced around the sparsely furnished room, placing his letters on the arm of the couch. The room was bare and dusty. There was a stack of Smithsonian and National Geographic magazines and a full ashtray and barely anything else. The sliding glass door to the balcony had no curtain or blinds, and a small flock of little dark birds fluttered on the railing, frenzied in the spitting snowfall. She stared out across the stretch of naked oaks. The sky was thickly grey. It would take her at least an hour to drive home in the traffic. And it was Tuesday, a work night. The world closed in on her. She tried to brighten her face.
“Do you have any tea?” she asked. She knew he wouldn’t have coffee.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Let me check.” He went into the kitchen and she heard him opening cabinets. She glanced at the mail on the arm of the roughly-upholstered couch.
“Andy,” she said, moving toward the kitchen, “Why did you stop going to school?”
He looked at her, holding a box of tea. “Rooibos,” he said, “is this good?”
“Yes,” she said, “sure.” She leaned against the counter, watching him fill a kettle at the sink and set it on the stove. He hadn’t turned the overhead light on and the little square kitchen was shaded grey, like different pressures of a charcoal pencil. She was terribly aware of his closeness in the small space and she wanted to touch him. He was a warm shadow, the kitchen an edge of a dream. If she touched him now, it wouldn’t be a disturbance to her real life, it would be a luxuriant dream that she could wake from just by leaving the apartment. Her heart raced. Just tell me, she ached to say, tell me you quit school because of me. Blame me, please. I want to know how much I matter.
He had his hands on the rim of the sink. “I know why you came here,” he said. “You’re bored.” He looked down at her, his long face half in shadows. He looked older, suddenly. He looked old or impossibly young depending on the light as he moved around the apartment. Like the surface of water, the way she saw him constantly shifted. She knew him, and then she didn’t know him. Her confidence shifted, too. She was in control and she could leave at any time, she could turn all of this off and walk away.
“Bored, bored,” he muttered, teasing. “You have everything you wanted and now you’re bored with it all.”
The kettle whistled and he moved to reach for it, pouring tea into two mismatched coffee mugs. He reached to put the kettle back on the burner. She held her cup of tea, because she didn’t know what else to do, and the heat felt good. She glanced out the window at the darkening night, at a car turning into the parking lot from South Lakes Drive.
He moved toward her, putting his hands on her hips, sliding them under her blouse. He pushed her hard against the counter. He moved his hands up her body, cupping her face, pressing his fingers into the base of her neck. “When you first left, I spent days longing for you to come back. But it’s too late now. I don’t care anymore.”
“I don’t believe you,” she said. She tilted her head a little in his hands; he pressed his fingers a little harder.
“Of course not,” he said, his voice wavering slightly, like a nervous teenager. “You’re a liar. How would you know what to believe?”
It was fully dark in the kitchen now. There was an orange glow from the streetlights, streaks of light from cars turning into the parking lot. She felt broken and disoriented. He held her still, his hands behind her neck, his body pressing her against the counter. She had a strong desire to just collapse there, melt in his hands and give up.
“I was so confused then, Andy,” she whispered.
“That’s your excuse?” he said, his breath warm on her ear. “You’ll have to try harder than that.”
His fingers pressed into her neck, sliding tight over her shoulders. She felt the burn of his fingernails. He pinned her against his chest and she could feel his heart pounding in deep, fast gulps. She put her hands on his waist, under his sweater, gripping his t-shirt. Her face was against his neck; she could feel the veins in his throat buzzing. She brushed her lips against his burning skin.
“Andy, please,” she begged.
His hands dropped immediately from her shoulders to her skirt and the waistband of her stockings. He lifted her and pushed her back against the counter so that she was half sitting on it, suspended in the sling of his long arms. The back of her head hit the cabinet hard once, and then a second and third time. She winced, writhing; she was engulfed by him and it was dark. A wave of panic ran through her, perspiration breaking out on her cheeks and under her arms. When her head hit the cabinet the sixth or seventh time, hard, she cried out, and he pulled her from the counter and said, “Get on the floor.”
On the dining room floor, her face turned and pressed against the carpet, the chemical smell of carpet shampoo in her head and the beam of the street light through the unadorned windows in her eyes. It was some kind of unearthly light, the angle of it, so bright and fake and stark against the black night. This angle of light and degree of light, existing nowhere else but in this empty room in the apartment where she shouldn’t be. There was a kind of blinding heat starting at the back of her throat and radiating all over her She felt all of her joints loosen, everything in her skull come undone and roll away, roll out of her head and across the empty floor. She felt drunk, sinking, like a falling dream. It was euphoric. Oh, the damage, she thought. A great swing of her arm into something priceless, and then the gleeful crash.
Andy knelt above her, his dark head silhouetted in the dim light, and then he stood and vanished into the corridor. Teresa sat up, gathering her pantyhose and her skirt and finding her shoes near the refrigerator in the kitchen. She went into the living room and turned on the lamp near the door, sitting slowly on the couch to investigate the raised pink scratches on her arms. The grey cat lay purring beside her on her coat. She shoved the cat away and gathered the coat in her hands, brushing away the cat hairs.
Andy reappeared, a pack of cigarettes in his hand. He lit a cigarette, tossing the pack and lighter atop the stack of magazines, and lifted Teresa’s chin, turning her face in the light. “I’ll be curious to know what you tell your boyfriend when he you asks you how you got so scratched up.”
Henri was out of town for three weeks. Her heart soared. She touched her cheeks. “My face, too…”
“Your neck,” he said, “a little.”
The cat stretched, purring against her, butting its head against her hand. “By the way,” said Andy, “are you interested in taking that cat? I’m moving to a new place, with a bird.”
“Birds?” Teresa said. “Where are you going?”
“Maryland,” said Andy. He sat beside her on the couch, picking up the stack of letters from Georgetown, glancing at them and swiftly tossing them aside again.
“Won’t that be a long commute to your job?” she asked.
“What job?” said Andy. “If you mean the phlebotomy tech thing, I lost that job.”
“Aren’t you going back to Georgetown next semester?” she looked at him, watching him reach for the ashtray. Without looking at her he said, “Honestly, I don’t really see myself going back there anytime soon.”
“Oh,” she said. A wave of realization hit her, an undertow. She stood up, hungry suddenly to be alone in the dark of her car, to drive and think. “I’ll ask Henri about the cat and see what he says.”
“Good,” Andy said, “you let me know.”
She lowered herself and kissed his cheek; he raised his eyebrows. She felt foolish, turning quickly to the door and going out into the freezing open hall, rushing down the cement steps and out onto the sidewalk with its thin sheet of snow. She got into her car, her heart racing. The snow was over, the coating on the streets brushed aside by tires. She pulled out onto South Lakes Drive, finding the toll road, almost unconscious.
She thought of Henri as she drove, feeling rotten inside and tender toward him. Love for Henri coursed over her in waves. She cried as she drove; she was always crying when it came to Andy, he was just too much for her, it seemed. She gradually became aware of the aching in her thighs and hips. She could smell cigarette smoke all over her clothes. How repulsive; her coat would have to be dry cleaned to get the smell out.
She pulled into a gas station on Glebe Road and went inside. The place was bright and crowded with commuters and full of the hum of the soda machine and the rattle of the cash register. Teresa went into the lady’s room and washed her face, smoothing her hair and fixing her mascara. She went back out into the car and sat in the driver’s seat, rummaging through her purse for her phone. Her hands shook a bit. She held the phone, looking at the names on the glowing screen. She pressed the call button. It rang and rang. What time was it in Sao Paulo? She ended the call before Henri could answer.
On a usual evening, Teresa would return home to the sound of CNN and the clatter of silverware in the kitchen. Tonight, there was nothing but the hollow echo of her heels on the foyer tile. She went up the stairs to the dimmed living room and the long kitchen. Anita, the housekeeper, had left Teresa a salad in the refrigerator and the day’s mail stacked on the butcher block table. She ate the salad standing at the kitchen island, breezing through the pages of a furniture catalog. Her legs were cold; her feet hurt. She pushed the salad away and climbed the stairs to the fourth floor, the suite she shared with Henri. She pulled back the gauze curtains at their bedroom window and looked out at the row of townhouses across the street. The snow was decidedly over; the sky above the townhouse roofs a solid black, without clouds to reflect the streetlights. Teresa could see a faint spotting of stars.
She thought of her closet; did she have a red dress to wear to dinner with Henri when he returned from Sao Paulo? She went to the shower, to wash her hair. She turned on all the lamps in the room and the light in the walk-in closet, turning CNN up full blast so that she could hear it over the running shower. She wanted to fill her evening with noise and light; in time, she made it her goal to live in a wash of noise and light, always.
The Doctor
1.
Andy took a walk through the city in the afternoon. It was early May, 2004, and the blossoms had already fallen off of the cherry trees. The muddy grass on the Mall had been covered with straw and trampled by tourists, and the Tidal Basin and the reflecting pool smelled of the Potomac River.
Andy walked from Georgetown to Union Station, and when he got to the station he started to think about getting on an Amtrak train. He looked at the schedule and considered Philadelphia or New York. He could go anywhere he wanted on the east coast. He could be in Miami the next day. A childlike excitement rippled through him; when he was fifteen, he had run away from home. He’d taken his grandfather’s car in the middle of the night and driven from their house in Salsbury, Maryland, down the eastern shore of Virginia and through the bridge tunnel to Virginia Beach. He was in Virginia Beach for five days, sleeping in the car and under the deck of a boarded-up beach house. He took food and beer from convenience stores without paying for it, and twice he ate in a restaurant and left without paying. Nothing that he’d expected to come of the trip materialized; everything came to him easily, and he drove home when the inclination struck him. The Virginia Beach trip was a significant period in his life. Now he was twenty-six, and for the first time in eleven years he’d discovered that same thrill again. He pushed his hands into the pocket of his jeans and crossed the station lobby to the escalators down into the basement Metro station, to the subway that would take him home to Teresa. Losing Teresa was the price he had to pay. He stood on the crowded train and tried to make his mind go blank; some things are best done blindly.
That evening, she told him, “You’re making a mistake.” It was important to her that he became a doctor. “I know you want revenge, but you’re not thinking clearly.” She put her hand on his arm, but he pushed it away.
“I don’t care what you think,” Andy said. They stood in the kitchen, under the hanging lamp. He gathered up the junk mail on the counter and dropped it into the trashcan.
“I’m just afraid that if you take a break, you won’t go back,” she said.
He didn’t look at her. He walked past her to the sliding door and went outside into the weight of the humid night to smoke on the deck. She stood in the door with her hands on the screen.
“Are you even going to talk to me at all?” she asked in a tear-wet voice. Backlit by the kitchen lamp, with the screen door blurring the brightness of her matched skirt and blouse and the sunset colored paint on her fingernails and toes, and her long hair undone and falling in her face, she nearly looked like a stranger and he almost forgave her. It was too late for that, though.
“I don’t want to talk to you,” he said.
She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “I can’t be around you anymore,” she said. She went to the bedroom and packed up some of her things, her clothes, tangled jewelry, a bottle of perfume. Andy sat on the top step of the deck and starred out into the dark sloping lawn, the row of pines that masked the community swimming pool and the children’s jungle gym. Bats darted through the beams of light that shown from the security lamps mounted on the walls of the pool house. This was what he wanted more than anything: to sit alone in the dark summer night and watch darting bats and the fog rise out off the damp grass at dawn. He wanted time to stand still and his mind to go blank.
It would take two years for him to realize that you can’t make time stand still. Time is a living thing, indifferent to the human illusions of memory. Memory is a trick of the mind; time is a wild animal.
2.
July, twilight, mid-week. Occasionally at night he walked a half-mile to the convenience store for cigarettes, watching the bats dive around the street lights and all the insects that came loose at night to whirl around and crash and die in the light. One night he found a huge moth on the front stoop of the house, its wings decorated by two enormous spots like hideous eyes. The animal looked like a terrifying face with hellish eyes; it was a true illusion, this creature with fern-like antennae, harmless. A wild housecat ate it later and left the wings in pieces, scattered on the steps. Out on the deck cicadas bashed against the sliding glass door and spun out onto their backs, whirling, exposing their startling white undersides. The loose cat ate them, too.
At times there were glorious thunderstorms. In the subterranean windowless corridors of the hospital, Andy never saw rain or felt the full flush of midday heat. Now he could witness the revelation of light, degrees of light at dawn and noon and dusk, layers of summer haze and the delicious mounting threat of a storm. When the rain came, it thundered over the house. It was timeless and unstoppable, mindless like an animal, pure instinct.
Fireflies fluttered against Andy’s face when he sat on the deck steps smoking; a heavier flutter than the delicate mosquitoes. He let mosquitoes hit him and bite his skin; he stared at the swimming pool unblinking, sinking his mind into its calm blue. A daddy long legs crawled over his knee, over his hand; he watched it barely miss the glowing end of his cigarette.
Every morning destroyed insects appeared on the deck and the front steps. One night the culprit bounded over the banister: a sleek grey cat with white paws. She pounced on a cicada, crushing its cellophane wings. She batted it, gleeful; it rattled and protested and egged her on until she bit it in two and spit the parts out onto the rubber doormat. Then she came and stroked herself against Andy’s legs, purring. He drifted his fingers over her spine, her tail gliding between them.
A girl came out of the darkness. It was very late, perhaps 2 am. It was past the time for slugs and almost the end of the time for bats. She said, “Hey squirrelly, you feline,” and scooped the cat up into her arms. Her hair fell over her face in a curtain and as she stood it slid away and she stood before him, calmly staring at him; a living porcelain doll.
“I hope he wasn’t bothering you,” she said. Her laconic voice let him know that she didn’t hope that at all, she didn’t care or hope for anything. She was a lush-bodied teenager in a thin white t-shirt, barefoot. Jennifer. She was an apparition.
“Only the bugs,” Andy told her. He flicked some ashes into the ashtray and picked up his nearly empty glass, holding one in each hand.
The girl petted her cat, its head nudging her hand. She wore neat khaki shorts, her feet bare, her toes wiggling in the grass. Peeking beneath her white cotton shirt was a glimpse of white belly, a pinch of baby fat. “So you’re a night owl too, huh?” she said. She turned toward the swimming pool. “Don’t you ever just want to dive into that pool at night?” She looked at him. “They lock the gate at night; I’d have to be drunk to do it.”
Inside, she set the cat down and rather than running, it moved between their legs, stepping delicately over their feet. The cat seemed nearly drugged in its friendliness. The full rush of sterile air conditioning was a shock after the humid night. In the pool of light over the kitchen sink, Jen opened her hand. “Look,” she said. A tiny, shining brown click beetle crawled on her palm. She grasped it in her thumb and forefinger and it began to spasm, the first segment of its body jerking up and down in desperation. She released it and it launched itself into the air, falling into the sink with a click and sliding helplessly into the gaping drain.
Andy filled his glass and took a glass from the cabinet for her. He filled her glass and she took it from him. He felt the cat stroking his bare ankles; he lifted his eyes to her soft round face.
“I know I look young, but I’m twenty. You don’t have to worry about anything, I’ve got a head on my shoulders.”
“I’m not worried,” he said, and she smiled.
Somewhere in his foggy mind, it amazed him that he was capable of scaling the chain-link fence, and it wasn’t until the sting of chlorine hit the wound that he became aware that he’d cut his hand. When he found his shirt and shorts later they were smeared with blood and the blood flowed out of his hand in the water in a rich plume, a stirring of darkness under the floodlights. It burned.
They didn’t dive. Once they were at the edge of the pool a certain unspoken reverence rose between them, a respect for silence. Jen stripped and slowly inserted herself into the lukewarm water, heated by the Virginia mid-summer daylight. The circulation motor hummed; drowned insects spotted the water surface. She lowered herself deeper and deeper into the water, immersing her head and vanishing below. She glided under the water like a seal. And then Andy went under, too.
He couldn’t remember the last time he swam. It was splendid. His body moved forward in the water almost instinctively. His muscles came alive; it was effortless flight. It was like breathing. Only when he emerged and pulled himself up at the edge of the pool did he realize that he was panting. From the other end of the pool Jen’s head bobbed up, pale and glowing in the mist that rose off of the water’s surface.
The insects were quieting. Over the roofs of the townhouses, the sky was slightly lessening its darkness. Andy swam laps, grasping the edge of the pool after several turns, his legs floating in the deep end, and a thrill came over him with the sight of the pre-dawn light. The thrill rushed through him physically, a spasm; he felt hysterical, detached yet incredibly alive.
They climbed out of the pool. Andy found his clothes and pulled them on; they stuck to his wet skin. His hair dripped in his eyes. Jen clasped her shorts and top in her hands and climbed over the fence nude, unashamed and absurd.
“Thanks for the drinks,” she said. “See you later.” She padded barefoot and naked across the common green. He watched her until he saw her enter the backdoor of a house five doors down, the grey cat following behind her, swishing its white-tipped tail.
***
G. Walker
G. Walker lives in Richmond, Virginia. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from George Mason University, and she’s published fiction in Five Points, poetry in Phoebe, flash fiction on Everyday Genius, and nonfiction in Bird Watcher’s Digest.
